


Homecoming

by TheOriginalSuki



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Epilogue, F/M, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-03
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-04-07 07:13:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 14
Words: 31,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19080085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheOriginalSuki/pseuds/TheOriginalSuki
Summary: Halfway to him, she broke composure; she flew at him, an arrow from a bow, and he opened to receive her, lifting her, clutching her to the soft, neglected animal of his body.---Sansa has one request of Jon, and then he can leave her forever: help her to find a husband.





	1. Chapter 1

Spring crept up from the south and kicked the hive.  Winterfell came alive with buzzing, starting low, and growing into a drone.  

There was so much to be done.  Winter went begrudgingly; it left marks of tooth and claw.

Still, the sight of it heartened Jon as he approached; seated on the gray horse, whose posture he mirrored, slumped and listless.  His body swayed to balance on top of the shifting beast.  They were both tired, riding for a day and a half from the Wall.  Though Jon's weariness recessed far and in, to places light nor air could reach.

Ghost stiffened and lifted his head before bolting into a nearby copse.  Jon didn't call him back; the wolf would do as he wished.

The raven from Bran ordering Jon home came not long after Sansa's.  Jon didn't need to be told that it was the first thing Sansa did after she was made queen.  To her stern but insistent summons, Bran's was an afterthought, an echo.  That wolf woman was a force of nature.  She had brought armies down to the very doors of hell for his sake.  She was never going to leave it.  Bran must have known.  But, he allowed their enemies to be appeased for a time while he adjusted to the throneless rule of the Six Kingdoms.

Jon needed to settle the Wildlings first.  He scrawled off a brief and evasive response, because somewhere between his hesitant affirmation and her good-natured annoyance was Jon and Sansa's rhythm.  He did not rush things.  Like Ghost, he came back when it was time.

 

***

 

The clamour of the courtyard aided a discreet entrance; builders and surveyors went in and out, throwing orders over their shoulders.  Smiths emerged, smudged and sweaty, handling their rakes and spades and even ploughs, tools of peacetime.  Jon dismounted to go on foot, leading the horse in through the open gates.  A child ducked into his path, and Jon staggered a bit to keep from stepping on her.  She took no notice of him, taunting her playmate to come and get her.  A smile flickered across his lips.

He saw to his horse.  After he stood for several minutes surveying the castle, its open wounds and healed over scars speaking to him.  Then he entered the main keep in search of Sansa.

A few people looked at him, recognition kindling behind their eyes, but soon absorbed back into their work and play.  He cut through the kitchens, sidling by sweat-pressed bodies, the smell of broth simmering and bread rising.  A great-girthed woman yelled at him and went back to slapping dough.

He came into the council room, for the door was open, unguarded, and the air of informality invited him in.  At the end of the room a group of people stood, speaking, interrupting each other, nodding and gesturing toward the papers laid flat on the table.  

 In their midst stood Sansa.  Or rather, she stood out from them, a good inch taller than most, and a great deal redder.

He stopped then, hanging back, content to watch for a while.  She pressed her lips together in a formal smile, nodded, spoke to the maester.  Leaned her head to the side to better hear his response.  Her dress, practical but elegant; her bright braids her only crown.

His study drew her; her gaze flickered from the table's surface upward and landed on him as surely as if he'd called out her name.  She stilled, and her lips parted.  Jon tried a smile, but it cracked a little, and died like a spent flame.

Sansa's face betrayed nothing.  She moved slowly, rounding her men, who only noticed in increments; some paid no heed and went on talking; some followed her gaze and trajectory to where Jon stood, a shaggy wolf of a man in his Night's Watch black and wild furs.  

Halfway to him, she broke composure; she flew at him, an arrow from a bow, and he opened to receive her, lifting her, clutching her to the soft, neglected animal of his body.  

She buried her face in his neck, and Jon shut his eyes against everything and everyone else.  She drew in a long breath against him: in, out.  She took him into her, wholly, and exhaled him again, himself--no more, no less.

He set her down, and his arms fell away.  She loosened her hold around his neck and shoulders and dropped her hands to his forearms, smiling at last.

When he looked at her it was sad and sweet.  "Well," he said, "I'm back."

 

*** 

 

Air moved through the open windows of the bedchamber, mingling with the smoky fire, determined to steal its breath away.  Jon bent over the table eating quietly but with great appetite.  Sansa, sitting across from him, watched with upturned brows; noted every tear of teeth in bread.

"What took you so long?"  The question was plaintive, not accusing.

His chewing slowed.  He swallowed.  "I had things I needed to do first."

"I needed you  _here_."

He looked at her from beneath his brow.  "Am I your subject, then?"

She glared, but he did not withdraw.  Their familiar stalemate.

She sighed, deflating.  Looked about the room as she spoke, as if help could come from the rushes and the rafters.  "You're no more my subject than I was yours when you were king."

His brief laugh knocked loose some of the tension, and she smiled.

"But I do need you.  I was never meant to do this alone."

Jon took a deep swig of ale.  "You look like you've done fine to me."

She scoffed.  "I had to make do.  That doesn't assuage the fact that my kinsman--and the person I trust most in the world--was holed up at the forsaken wall all winter for crimes for which he should not even be held accountable, while I had to fumble my way through ruling."

"I'm your most trusted adviser now, am I?"  The glint in his eyes was not from the fire.

 She huffed, a typical response to this type of banter.  "Don't be stupid...of course you are."

 Jon sunk into his chair, his plate now clean.  Sansa took notice of this and jerked into motion, going to to refill it.  "Eat more."

 He sat up again, and touched her wrist to leave off.  "Sansa, I'm not sure how long I'm staying here."

 Her manner plummeted.  "What are you saying?  This is your home.  This is where you belong."

Jon put his face into his hands and leaned into them.  When he came away, he said, "I'm tired, Sansa."  They were back in Castle Black again, with the old wounds fresh and bleeding.  "I've fought and died and fought some more.  I'm not a Stark, not a Targaryen.  I'm not alive, but I'm not dead.  I don't belong anywhere any more.  I never really did."

Her lip trembled.  It hurt worse that she tried to bite it away.  He put his hand out and reached for hers where it rested on the table.  Her palm turned upward to grasp his.  "You can do as you wish," she said, quietly.  "You've more than earned it, Jon.  But don't say that it is because you are not a Stark -- because you  _are_ \-- and do not say that you do not belong -- because you belong with me."

He heaved a sigh, closed his eyes, and nodded.  She squeezed his hand.  Standing, Sansa leaned over the table, planting a dry, lingering kiss below the line of his hair.  "Rest now.  No harm will befall you here."  

 She stepped out of the room shutting the door behind her; he knew she would make it true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For our community; for writers who expect nothing but to give us pleasure and reprieve; and the love of fans who bring the characters to life: this is for you. This is all of ours.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sansa has a request.

There was so much to talk of, and she didn't know where to begin.  

She almost wished she didn't have to, that they could stay suspended like this forever, in a permanent deadlock.  It was characteristic of their relationship since the beginning.  As children, they only ever existed in proximity, rarely coming into contact except when circumstance demanded.  It had been Sansa's fault.  She was a petulant and naive girl.  But he'd forgiven her for that so entirely; she had to press him to accept her apology.  

For months afterward, they were each other's constant companion.  Jon had said Father's ghost would haunt him if he didn't look after her.  In truth, they were mutual anchors, each grasping onto the nearest human thing to keep from drowning.  The barely-brother she had left in that long-ago summer had filled up and out; the flex of his shoulders broken in but resilient.  His dark eyes carried something out to her, and she hung all she was on it.  In that moment, all the songs of her childhood dissolved, and there was Jon.  Only Jon.  

Then Jon went away to Dragonstone.  He departed a king and came back a vassal.  He left hers and returned, another's.

Perhaps if they hadn't been preparing for war, she would have felt the excruciating loss of him.  There were moments when the canyon between them stared her down, daring her to jump.  But she couldn't feed that dragon, not when there were so many other demons at the door.  When Arya killed the Night King and the white walkers shattered, and Jon rode south with Daenerys to King's Landing, Sansa was at last left alone to reckon with the absence of him.  The North, wounded and drained of strength and men, picked itself up and starting putting itself back together.  But it was slow-going.  Everyone was weary.  Then they heard word from the South.

 In the Dragon Pit, Sansa secured the freedom of the North with hope.  It was her wish that Jon would return to be king.  She had counted on such, when she rallied the armies of the north, and set off to free him.  But the Jon she bid farewell to on the wharf after his imprisonment was a broken man.  

"I'm tired of fighting," he had told her, so many moons before then, when they stood in the cold stone chamber of Castle Black; she had as good as blackmailed him.  "I'll do it myself if I have to," she said; and she knew, even though she meant it, that he would never let her do it alone.  So when he told her, in the salt-balmy south, "Ned Stark's daughter will speak for them," it settled on her like a gentle hand.  But she took it as a command.

***

 

Ghost ambled into the courtyard a few days later.  He made straight for the great hall, where he settled by the fire, only lifting his head to receive attentions behind his solitary ear.  At night, he scratched at the door of Sansa's bechamber.  She let him in.

Jon threw himself deep into the work of Winterfell, to mixed reaction.  Some felt him a war criminal who sacrificed their men to the ambitions of a foreign queen; though most remembered the King in the North and what he had done for them, over and over again.  Jon kept his head down and his hands busy.  If a lad clapped him on the shoulder he responded favourably, and with humility.  He didn't react to barbs, and those tasteless enough to try saw their efforts go nowhere, and left it.  He went where he was needed, and spoke when it was necessary but otherwise was content to follow.

Sansa too was busy; everyone seemed to need her, at every moment.  Belted, braided, tied and pinned, she tucked away her impatience and fatigue, leaving no part of her lose or undone.  She took meals in a hurry, barely sitting, and fell into bed late at night, where sleep swallowed her whole.

When she and Jon met each other it was briefly, and only ever to exchange a few words of utility.

 

***

 

On the fourth day since Jon's return, they completed the repairs on the outer bailey.  The smallfolk and builders were invited to the great hall that night, and Queen Sansa sat amongst them.  It was a subdued kind of celebration, for everyone was rather tired; but the easiness of peacetime lightened the mood of all, and as the night wore on, and the ale poured out, people grew bolder, louder.  Sansa, lonely, pristine in her wooden throne at table at the head of the hall, warmed to their liveliness.  She watched some children scramble over and under benches, knocking over a goblet, dodging the swipe of an inebriated elder.

A low, slow scrape--Jon drew a chair up next to her.  "May I sit?"

She tipped her chin down in affirmation.

"That's a pretty crown."

Her hand went up to it as if to remind her what it looked like.  A simple circlet made from two wolves meeting above her forehead.  "Do you think it suits me?"

"Aye."

A serving maid set a heaping platter before him and filled a cup with wine.  Sansa covered her own chalice, declining a refill.

She let him eat in peace while continuing to watch the growing rowdiness of her people.  A warmth pooled in and loosened her joints.  Jon's being occupied allowed him to view her briefly as she was, without the knowledge of anyone's attention on her.  He'd seen that look before, on Sansa's mother, when she watched her children from a distance.

After a while, Sansa composed herself again, and said, "Your help is appreciated."  She let her eyes press her sincerity.  

He met them back steadily and nodded.

Then, a little cooler, "Do you know for how much longer you will be staying with us?"

"I thought to ride out with the surveyors to Wintertown and see how things are getting on there. Help get things underway before setting off to the Wall again."

Sansa looked down.  Her finger traced the grain of the table.  "I was hoping you could take a more active role in helping me before you go."

Her raised his brows.  "I'll help you.  If I can."

She sighed and a little bit of her posture slipped. "There are things that I ... well, that I would like your insight and advice on."

Humor wrinkled his brow; he half-laughed, "Really?" 

She glared but her mouth smiled.  "Yes,  _really_."

He held up his cup in a mock-toast before taking a drink.  "What would Tyrion Lannister think of your choice in counsel?"

She darkened.  "I'm not much interested in Tyrion's  _opinions_ , much less his passing judgements."  

Ah, so she held it against him, Jon's banishment to the Wall.  At least, in Sansa's formidable ire, Jon was in good company.  A ragged memory surfaced, of the small man in a dirty storage room in King's Landing.  Burning flooded his chest.  The ghosts of tears scorched his eyes.  A dagger -- Jon shoved it back under the surface of his consciousness.

She detected his drop in mood and shifted uncomfortably.  "Come away to the solar with me.  I'd rather discuss things with you in private."

 

***

 

The ominousness was not lost on Jon, and his nerves ran live as Sansa led them through the empty halls to her solar.  Entering, Sansa went to the hearth and threw a dry brand into the dying fire.  She clapped her hands to knock off the dirt and dust.  Then she gestured to a seat with her eyebrows raised in invitation.  Jon declined.  He folded his arms around himself and half-sat, half-leaned on a table instead.  This was clearly a ready position, but Sansa didn't know if he was braced to help her or in dread of the request.

Sansa cleared her lungs and sunk into her chair.  "This isn't any easy thing to ask of you."

He peered steadily at her from beneath the ever-frowning brow.

"The winter was hard.  But it kept us occupied, and as long as the present so demanded our attention, we could spare no thought for the future.  But things are better now, and the lords are hopeful--and so they should be!  They're turning to questions of expansion, renovation, and inheritance.  I'm not under any delusions that this would never be brought up.  I understood it implicitly when I agreed to be queen."

Jon was tempted to heckle her for being so cryptic.  But her posture and the rapid blinking of her eyes kept him silent.

"My lords and advisers ... are all in agreement that I should marry--"

A long creak of wood on flagstones; Jon shifted his weight.

The rest of her words dissolved like salt.

"Marry."  Not a question, not a reply.

She risked a look toward him.  Unreadable.

"And ... who do they ...  _agree_... you should marry?"

"There are no immediately obvious candidates--"

"You've no one particular in mind?"

"Gods, Jon, no!"

His hardness fell away from him as he approached, taking the chair he'd been previously offered.  He clasped her hand, pulling it towards his lap.  "Haven't you suffered enough husbands?  Can they not be satisfied with your utter devotion and bone-weary work without asking this of you?"

She smiled sadly.  It was so good to hear him say that, so, so affirming.  "They are right though, Jon.  The North is only just finding its legs as an independent kingdom again.  To protect its autonomy, we need an heir.  To have an heir I must marry..."  She took her hand out of his.  "Unless...I don't suppose...you'd want to marry...?"

A winged shadow moved over his face.  Darkly, with finality, "No."

She shook her head.  "I thought not.  And Arya is gone, so there is no hope there--unless she abandons everything that makes her Arya and returns to Gendry to exchange the salt wind in her hair for the shackles of court and courtesy."  The very suggestion choked her.

"So adopt an heir."

"Do you think I didn't bring that forward?  They are not satisfied.  A blood claim is the only sure way to secure the game."

He didn't like her when she talked like this; like a little Cersei, and he heard the whispers of Littlefinger, twisting in her, manipulating.  He'd made himself a parasite, living on in his victims.

"You've made up your mind."  He'd meant to say it cooly, snapped like the lid on a box, but weariness chaffed away his edges.  "Why are you bringing this to me if you won't hear my counsel?"

"I want you to help me choose."

He started to shake his head, rolling his eyes to the ceiling in disbelief.

"No, don't -- don't  _do_ that -- put aside your insecurity for half a moment, for  _me_ \-- for all you are the northern fool, you forget that you almost killed a monster of a man with your bare fists for what he did to our family.  My lords have sense of practicalities and matchmaking.   _You_ are the only person left north of the Neck who will look out for  _me_."  And she didn't need to say what she meant by it, the me that was the small, raw little girl grown disfigured and hardened with scarring.

"You help me with this one thing; that's all I ask of you.  And you can return to the Wall, and beyond, and you'll have kept your promise to protect me and have satisfaction in knowing that you've left me in the best possible care because you will have chosen him yourself."

His eyes drifted over her; she recognised the tell in them; he wavered, on the precipice of conceding.

She put her hand back into his, and pushed him off the edge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updating without a beta so please look kindly on me! Also, comments are deliciously motivating.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon has a few things to say.

In the days following his exile, Jon wrapped himself in solitude--out of one prison straight into another.  Disassociation was the lock, and detachment the key.  

 

Tormund was good.  He didn't tiptoe around Jon.  He was the same over-wielding bear of a man, even when Jon failed to laugh, or live.  Jon wandered further north.  In the days he walked until he couldn't feel anymore.  In the nights he dreamed; sometimes, they were sweet, memories of home and childhood; other times, they were of women, limp in his arms, dead by his hands.  All he knew of love was deceit and death.  

He couldn't call up much of that time after the long night, when he left for King's Landing.  A fog obscured it.  

He could just recall the uncomfortable desire he felt for Daenerys; it stared as a spark but too soon roared into flame.  Dragon called out to dragon.  Soon they were both burning.  It burned out everything else, until they rode into Winterfell, and he saw Sansa.  Her look told him everything he needed to know; she was not pleased.  And for a moment he saw the situation through her eyes, clearly framed; how he brought a beautiful and dangerous queen into their very home, unbidden, without consulting her.  It was the first prickling of guilt that would grow and span wild beneath his skin for many weeks more, culminating in the moment when he stood in the destruction of King's Landing, wanting to die; and the words going over and over in his mind were, "Sansa will never, never forgive me."  Funny that at the end of the world, the dominant fear somehow keeping him sane should be so domestic.  

Though the poison was thick in his blood, that treacherous Targaryen madness, some unaffected part of him eased as soon as the dragon queen left Winterfell.  Something about the way Daenerys spoke to him, her eyes hard and absent, like an inversion of the Night King's, "I just told you how."

By pushing toward exhaustion, he could put distance between himself and the horrors of that war.  And though her angelic face still submerged him in a mix of violent desire and repulsion, he could think of other things as well.  He thought of Sam and the baby that must have been born by now; he thought of Arya with her face braced to the ocean spray in the west.  He thought of Sansa, the way she stifled her tremors on the docks that day, and how he thought, "this is where I leave you."  And instead of anger there was only an overwhelming tenderness, and for that moment--one blessed moment--her sure embrace dosed the burning pain of Daenerys' love, before it enveloped him again.  As he walked away, he looked back at all of them -- the little sister who now was a bedfellow of death; the little boy whom he had teased, whose smile he would never see quite the same again; and the stranger-turned-family who had stood, damaged but resilient, in the courtyard of Castle Black, and given him something to fight for again.

***

Sansa caught him early one morning, after just having splashed away the night's sleep with icy water.  Jon opened the door to her tapping, and she held something out in front of her.

"I made you some clothes," she said. "Have the others sent down to the laundry."

He took the bundle from her hands.   "When did you--how've you found the time to make these?"

"I made them during the winter.  There was not much to do in the long dark evenings but sit flush to the fireside and try to to keep from freezing.  I had to work your measurements from memory.  Anyway, I've found them again, so you might as well have them.  They should fit you."  Her smile was so easy that he forgot to thank her.  She walked away, and he shut the door slowly.

***

The first order of business was to hear how spring fared in the other regions.  The lords, and those sent as proxies, had a fair amount of complaints; but there was good news, too.  In the winter, the queen had established new houses, and these had taken root and born fruit.  The old loyal houses were there, too.  Sansa received Meera Reed with a tender sobriety.  They didn't speak of Bran, but he was with them nevertheless, in the very space of his absence.

This ordinary seeing-to and taking-stock lasted for quite a few hours.  A slight nausea crept up behind Sansa's nose and eyes.  It was warm in the room with the spring sun streaming in, and she hadn't slept well.  On her left, Maester Wolkan sunk into a shallow sleep.  To her right, Jon leaned his elbows on the table, hands folded.  Sansa blinked away her afternoon sleepiness and stood up from her chair.

The clatter of the many bodies standing jolted Wolkan awake.  Sansa motioned for her men to sit again, speaking, "I thank you for your time in coming here today, my lords; but we had better get on to another matter.  We have spoken in previous months of the necessity of an heir for the crown.  This necessity is precluded by that of a marriage, and the terms of that marriage have been discussed to some length, though not by all present.  We are, I think, agreed that any potential suitor must be a good match for the North; what that means remains to be seen.  We are also in agreement than a potential husband take the Stark name; and that our children and heirs are to be Starks as well.  I would at this time open the floor, and have you each come forward with your own proposals and suggestions."

As she sat, the room roared to life; each man from the highest lord to the lowest steward spoke out at once, so that Jon stood abruptly and knocked the pommel of Longclaw on the table.  It sliced the noise like a knife, and silence followed.  Jon lowered himself into his chair like a wary animal.

White whiskered Lord Manderly cleared his throat and stood to speak, "If I may, Your Grace.  I believe I am not alone in saying that the consort of the Queen in the North should himself be a northerner.  Have we not had enough of southern subjugation?  I say we put a restriction on suitors from outside our own realm."

Several others, such as Lord Glover and Lord Cerwyn, made noises of agreement.

Yet a Lord Cutter from one of the lesser houses spoke: "I acknowledge the loyalty of men with northern blood, but a match with another nation could yield great advantage.  We are a sparse population, and our products are limited; we've a good trade established through White Harbor, aye, but imagine a union with House Arryn, with its connections further south.  Yohn Royce already looks kindly on us and would make a powerful ally."

"Or even a Dornish one," someone else interjected.

There was a wave of objection, followed by a wave of agreement, and the room was once again in chaos, so that Jon had to knock the hilt of his sword again.  After this second warning, they kept their heads, and came forward at least in a semblance of turn-taking.  Some thought a match from a lesser house more desirable, in case a stronger figure could to weaken the claim of a woman, Stark or no; still others felt that a more powerful house would consolidate power in the seat of Winterfell.  A minority threw their weight behind the Dornish prince, but as others rightly pointed out, the Dornish might not be interested in a marriage alliance: the king consort-to-be would have to relocate north, and the people of Dorne didn't wander much further north than the Crownlands.

Sansa followed the back-and-forth with her face schooled and her back straight.  Occasionally, Maester Wolkan leaned over to speak in her ear and she nodded curtly, but her eyes travelled over to Jon, who watched with the trace of a scowl.  As the talk began to die down, Jon pressed a fist to the table; he stood slowly; he was not at tall man, but his stature commanded, and the others dropped their conversation to give him their attention.

He rapped the back of his knuckles on the table contemplatively.  "In all this talk of potential suitors, I've yet to hear one word of courtship."

"Courtship, Your G--.  My  _lord_?"  Lord Cerwyn caught his mistake and righted it clumsily.

"Aye.  There's a good deal of talk about what will bring security and wealth to the North and its houses, and I've no quarrel with that.  But this is to be the husband of our Queen, and I would insist that whoever seeks her hand show himself worthy in more ways than material wealth and status."

Sansa felt the warmth in the room climb.

Out of the uncomfortable silence, someone muttered, and there was fit of coughing.

A proxy from House Dustin spoke.  "Of course we take our Queen's happiness into consideration."  A few others muttered indignantly.

Jon pivoted toward Sansa, who kept her gaze noncommittal, unfastened on anyone or anything.  "Let any suitor approach with humility to offer his hand.  A man without honor, without tenderness, is not worthy of her."

Sansa parted her lips, but she was of two minds.  Part of her thought, this was absurd.  What would it matter to be wooed if she could get a husband that would secure their future in word and deed?  Yet hadn't she asked him to be a voice of concern for her in these dealings?  She could hardly fault him for not dismissing her childish fantasies of a loving marriage; at least one of mutual trust and affection.

The nausea behind her nose peaked, and she felt heat pulsing between her ears.  She ought to say something, but she couldn't keep her vision steady.  The nausea sharpened into a stab of pain, into a million pin pricks behind her eyes, and her head floated, and she couldn't feel her body, but somehow she knew she was slipping.  And then she knew nothing at all.

***

Scraps of consciousness floated to the surface.  Maester Wolkan holding her wrist at the pulse point.  The intense nausea and the overbearing light.  Jon lifting her from --  _wherever_ she was -- she knew it was him because of his smell and the gentle give of his grip -- her objection to being moved coming like a moan.

Then she was on cool furs atop a soft bed with a current of air moving over her.  Maester Wolkan fussed at her pillows.  He spoke to her, dragging her into consciousness, "Are you ill, Your Grace?  What have you eaten today?"

"Mmm ... can't remember."

"That doesn't inspire much confidence."

A handmaid moved a wet cloth to Sansa's forehead.

 

"I think you should stay in bed for the remainder of the day, Your Grace."

 

Sansa shoved up on her elbow; but a swoop of nausea caused her to drop again.  "I can't just lie in bed," she protested.  "There's too much work to do--there's the ledgers--I'm meant to meet the kitchen steward to go over inventory."

 

"I'll see to it," came Jon's voice, though she couldn't tell from where now.

 

Maester Wolkan turned and exchanged some words with the disembodied voice of Jon, but Sansa couldn't follow the conversation.  It came over as from a great distance, like waves, the soothing sound of Jon's speech, absent of all meaning.  She squeezed her eyes against another wave of nausea; after a time, the voices left and she succumbed to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My only knowledge is of the television series, so my knowledge of the Westerosi houses is pretty basic. Feel free to fill me in.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sansa starts to take suitors.

 

 

Sansa did not rest well.  Talk of marriage conjured ghosts she thought she had laid to rest -- no, that wasn't true.  She would never be free of them, but she could shut them behind a door so wide and tall her waking self could never scale it.  But some treacherous combination -- the melting snow, the interested but hands-off attention of Jon, seeing Meera with her honest face and large, knowing eyes -- strained the cracks, and nightmares trickled through.  She must have whimpered or called out in her sleep because the guards sent a handmaiden in to check on her.  Shaken awake, Sansa struck out and cuffed the girl on the lip where it split and swelled.  The handmaiden was kind about it, which made it all the worse.  Sansa reigned in the tears and asked her, with as much dignity as she could muster, to leave her.

 

It must have got round because the next day, people eyed her in that sickening mix of pity and preciousness.  She met Jon in the hall, but she couldn't tell if he knew.  He pointedly did not ask her if she slept well; but when he spoke to her it was the same way he always had; with a kind of regard that stripped her of all titles and pretensions.  It was hard not to be vulnerable with him.  He zeroed in on the essence of her and appealed to that.  It was both tender and terrifying.

 

"I saw to the ledgers, yesterday, and there was a miscalculation with regards to the granaries.  It should be sorted now.  And," he procured a scroll from inside of his jerkin, "a Lord Bertilak seeks your permission to come court you this sennight next."  He hesitated before handing it over to her.

 

Sansa pretended to look at it, but really she stifled the sinking sad feeling rising in her gut.  "Good," she said.  "I'll send a response directly, telling him I will hear his suit.  If you see the steward, would you send him to me?  The household need be prepared for feeding and housing guests."

 

"Do you know anything of this Lord Bertilak?"

 

"No, but I will hear him out."

 

She turned and started to walk back the way she had come.  Jon fell into stride with her.  "Don't hear too much.  He is the first of many who will be coming to you in this capacity, and I don't think it wise to appear to amenable."

 

This stung her.  "Do you think I'm some common woman who will give way to any man who shows her the slightest interest?"

 

He gripped her elbow to make her face him.  He was grim.  "That's not what I said."

 

"Do enlighten me."

 

"If you want my help,  _as you asked_ , you will have to trust me.  There will be waves of suitors, Sansa, you are no small prize."

 

"I'm no  _prize_ at all."

 

He hissed in exasperation.  "I am not at odds with you here."

 

But for some reason this made her even angrier.  Somehow it was, it was his fault, and she didn't know why.  "Good.  I expect you to be there throughout.  This will be no frivolous courtship, with long walks in the meadows and evenings drowned in the music of lute-string.  Lands, titles, dowries.  These are the things that matter.  And," she softened, "and I need your insight into the heart of a person.  I don't think I could bear it; to not marry a  _good_ man."

 

A short nod, and he looked at her in that way he did, from beneath a fringe of lashes.  He understood.

 

***

 

When Lord Bertilak came, she received him from her throne.  Jon would have stood off to the side, but Sansa directed him with a glance to come stand beside her.  He understood implicitly that she needed to start with this show of strength; to let any would-be husband see her as unmovable, a mountain in the distance.  But in the feast later, as he was her guest of honor, she sat him next to her, in the place she usually kept for Jon.  Jon she moved just to the lord's side, so that the man was sandwiched unwittingly between two wolves.  If this made him nervous, he did not let on.  He was comely but not youthful, and he bore out Sansa's questions with patience: his whereabouts during the wars, his loyalty to House Stark, his lack of a wife after all these years.

 

After the feast, she allowed him to escort her around the godswood, but she halted him upon their reentrance, and motioned for Jon to take her arm instead.  In the privacy of her solar, she poured them both some ale and said, "Well?  He can offer the loyalty of a lesser house, and he seems uninterested in how I handle my affairs.  Perhaps after another moon or two of negotiation--"

 

The flames dancing in the hearth cast shadows in the caverns of Jon's face.  "A sensible man, I'll grant you, but not a faithful one.  A strong, handsome man of his age, the head of a household, who has taken no vows, has lain with women all along.  He has no interest in fidelity.  He will be set in his ways."

 

Taken aback at this insight, Sansa grappled for a response.  Even as the words came, she despised them, "Does that ... matter?"

 

"No," Jon said darkly, but it was not an answer to her question.  It was a final sentence passed like the swing of a sword.

 

Sansa didn't quite know what to do with his assertiveness.  So she nodded her head slowly.

 

"He should leave," Jon said, striding to the door and swinging it open.  "No point in entertaining him while we wait for better offers."

 

***

 

And better offers there were.  From young and old, and rich and poor, and landed and otherwise.  A representative of Robin Arryn came to communicate his interest; though the logistics of how a marriage would work, while she retained sovereignty of the north and he was vassaled to the South, begged further consideration.

 

The spirit of Winterfell picked up with the excitement with each newly arriving retinue.  In Wintertown, the tavern grew merry with the drunken laughter of smallfolk, mock-proclaiming their suits, and carrying off a scullery maid to stand in for Sansa.  Maester Wolkan and Jon Snow accompanied the queen during her courtships.  The North couldn't offer grand masks or tourneys for their guests, but a friendly spar was always fun, and sometimes a ride in the countryside north of Winterfell gave a would-be suitor a chance to urge his horse away from the queen's guards and advisers and exchange a word or two with her in semi-privacy.  They found her not unkind but guarded.

 

Jon spoke very little during these rides, but he watched carefully.  Between him and the ghost-white direwolf, people felt the queen to be guarded by half-tamed things.  In a day or two, he would come to Sansa and they would toss about their thoughts and observations.  Their discussions oftentimes turned into arguments.  Whenever Sansa found someone agreeable, Jon would list the ways in which the person in question fell leagues short of the mark.  When she pushed him on his reasoning, he eyed her warily and challenged her on the need to marry at all.  And Sansa would push back, saying, why wouldn't he come and stay in Winterfell? Take a wife, start a family as he always wanted, and provide her with heirs.  Jon would say, that opportunity had passed and was not to come again.

 

But some times, Jon came into her, and they didn't speak on the topic of suitors or household.  Instead, he put his feet up on the window ledge and carved a green apple, and she sat next to and facing him in the spring starlight and took the slices he offered her.  He laughed at the face she made when she tasted its tartness.

 

"It's early yet," Jon said, meaning the apples would get sweeter as the summer came in.  Then he sobered.  "We won't be able to do this anymore, you know."

 

She wiped the traces of sour juice from her lips with the back of her hand.  "What do you mean?"

 

"When you wed."  He stared out into the night, quiet.

 

"Why not?"  Her voice lifted slightly in annoyance.

 

"It isn't proper.  It's hardly proper now.  But for a married woman to keep such close company with a man who is not her husband, queen or no, kinsman though he may be -- when you marry, I will leave Winterfell.  You won't need me any more."

 

She stared hard at him.  He could feel her disapproval boring into him.  But her words came soft and sure.  "I'll always need you."

 

He got up and set down his carving knife on the window ledge, making to leave.  When he got to the door, he turned back, coming to stand over her where she sat listlessly in the dark and firelight.  He put his hand on the top of her head and stroked her leisurely; the way she did Ghost, familiar, respectful.  "You don't  _need_ anybody."  Reverence permeated the words, warmed all over with affection.  When he took his hand away and left, she felt a rising in her body, like a feather lifted on the air.

 

***

 

The first crop of spring ripened in the fields, and the workings of Winterfell halted to a standstill as all labor focused on harvesting and bringing the crops in before a spring snow could ruin them.  On the last day, everyone was ordered into the fields to complete the threshing and bundling, and Sansa, who had gone out to oversee and give direction, tucked her skirts into her belt, took the grubby hand of a child, and went to hoist the shining bales into the waiting wagons.  

 

Ghost ran around in a veritable frenzy, rolling in the stubble and snapping his jaws at invisible things in the air.

 

Jon, who was working a scythe with the other men, looked on with a faint smile then refocused his efforts.  The yellow blades of hay hovered in the air like a fine mist, scratching in the nose, throat, and eyes, but its sweetness salved the irritation.  As the sun lowered and the work waned, some people broke out into song.  A youth shoved an older man, who put his arm about his neck and tossed his hair.  

 

Women's laughter tempered the chill, and Jon, resting on the handle of his scythe for a moment, bent and picked a lonely wildflower.  He twirled it thoughtfully in his fingers, then lifting the scythe, approached the women, whose gentle laughter turned giddy at the sight of him, his shirt open at the throat, gleaming skin stuck with fine specks of dust and hay.  He stopped before Sansa, who looked up without a trace of surprise.  Jon bowed exaggeratedly, and held out the flower.  Sansa's smile spread wide and high, flooding into her eyes.  She laughed, took the flower, and, twisting the stem, wove it into her braids.  Jon took a moment to appreciate his handiwork, and it was so raw, so new, to see a real smile on him, that shone like a sunbeam through the dirt and sweat and sweet-smelling dust.  He hoisted his scythe up again and returned to threshing, Sansa to her bundling and lifting, and everything in the world was right and golden.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments keep me motivated and inspired. ;)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon and Sansa share their demons.

They brought the harvest in just in time.  The warm spell receded with a spring snow, and activities out-of-doors came to a halt.  A fleeting worry visited Sansa; perhaps this was a false spring after all.  But Maester Wolkan assured her that word from the Citadel remained steady and optimistic.  The irratic snowfall deterred people from travelling.  Without any visitors present when the clouds opened, the cold and white tucked Winterfell in like an island.  The people of the keep turned to inward tasks or otherwise took the opportunity to rest at ease, knowing that food was plentiful and work would return soon enough.

 

Sansa took on her embroidery for the first time since winter.  She sought Jon out to sit in his company, finding him in the library with Ghost, pouring over history books she was sure he hadn't touched since he was ten years of age.  Perhaps Targaryen history held his interest a little bit more now.

 

She folded her skirts to sit beside him.  Feeling his curiosity on her, she said, "You don't mind, do you?"

 

He lifted his brows and shook his head  _no_ , like a child caught doing something naughty.  "I was just about to go."

 

"Oh."  The fall of her voice gave away her disappointment.

 

He shut the cover of the his book and balanced it on the arm of his chair, pausing.  Then he said, "I'm just going to check on the piping for the water from the hot springs.  With the fluctuation in temperature, there's a danger of breakage."

 

"All right."  She settled her embroidery frame in her lap but didn't touch the needle.

 

"You ... can come with me ... if you like?"

 

She realized that she was close to pouting, and reigned herself in.  But when Jon rose and left, he put a mollifying hand on her shoulder for a briefest moment; Ghost raised his head as if questioning her; and Sansa sighed, set down her needlework, and headed out after him.

 

She caught up to him as they stepped out over the threshold of the closed-down kitchen; she'd been momentarily detained by a handmaid asking about her dinner; and as she came out into the still glass air it worked her loose.  She felt almost sprightly.  She nearly ran into Jon's back, but he turned swiftly and held his arm up.  "Easy.  Where's your cloak?"

 

"I don't need it," she said, though in truth she'd only realised she'd been without until he said something.  "You've not gone one."

 

"It's hardly cold," Jon said, turning about and carrying on.  "A wet, spring snow like this.  It probably won't last through morning."

 

She followed him to the pipeworks adjacent the godswood, a step behind, in a dreamy walk.  Ghost trotted here and there, mouth open, tongue lolling.  Tilting her head back, Sansa inhaled.  The quiet of a snowy night settled around her like a blanket.  A thin layer of snow crusted the crack in a wall; a trail of bluebells grew along in defiance.  Sansa thought of the little yellow wildflower Jon had given her.  She'd forgotten about it until she'd gone to dress for bed, lead-heavy with the satisfaction of a good day's work.  She caught a glance of herself in the mirror.  Worked the flower out with care and pressed it into a book for safekeeping.

 

Her role in accompanying him was hardly useful, so she stayed back while he tapped on the iron pipes and tested the pressure.  He gripped a handle and twisted.  A tongue of steam spurted out, and Ghost's skin jumped.  So Sansa waded about in a bit of snow and found a gnarled stick for him to play fetch.  He bounded over the snow-strewn cobbles like a puppy.

 

Jon seemed to be stalled.  She couldn't see his face, but the hunch of his shoulders told her he'd run into a problem.  He planted his feet and pulled up and back on a lever.  Stuck.  He shook his hands out to better prepare his grip and tried again.  Steam hissed like a dragon.  Water spurted, collided, and shoved him backward.  Jon landed in a soggy pile of snow, eyes wild, chest panting.

 

Sansa gasped.

 

Ghost padded up with the stick in his mouth.  Sat.  Tilted his head pointedly at Jon.

 

Sansa burst into laughter.  Jon's face, as he sat in the weeping snow, crumbled from shock to annoyance, then softened to humor.  "All right, all right," he muttered, "you've had your fun at my expense, now help me up."  He raised his arm and waved at Sansa, who smoothed away her laughter and approached with her hand outstretched to his.

 

He clasped her hand.  And  _pulled_.

 

Sansa tumbled down, landing in the snowdrift next to him -- all woollen skirts and copper hair, and a gasp shrill and high.  Icy water trickled into her clothes through seams and weave and laces.  And Jon laughed and laughed.

 

***

 

They stole back inside through a little-used entrance, at Sansa's insistence.  "I look a fright," she'd nagged at him, "I can't be seen like this!"  And Jon, instead of teasing her, mercifully acknowledged that it wasn't in keeping with a queen's image to come crawling in like a Wildling on a wet night.  With the chill in their bones and the back corridors of the castle beneath their soles, they felt like children again, sneaking out of their beds at night in defiance of Old Nan.  

 

When they ducked into Sansa's solar, shutting the door with held breaths, they burst into laughter again, and Sansa plopped unceremoniously onto the fur laid before the fire.  Someone must have been in to stoke it because it roared in greeting.

 

Jon came next to her and bent low, holding his hands to the warmth and shivering audibly.

 

"I thought you knew what you were doing," she teased.

 

"So did I."  Mirth danced in his dark eyes, or was it the firelight?

 

With her skirts arranged haphazardly around her waist, Sansa bent her knee and worked the buckle of her boot, then the other, kicking them off.  "How does the snow get everywhere?"  The fabric of her stockings itched and pricked; unthinking she put her fingers into the top of one and pulled it down, baring her leg to the drying flames.  It was an innocent enough thing to do, but the flash of her skin betrayed her.  The white webbed scarring shone luminous in the half-light.  She jerked her leg back beneath the damp skirts, but it was too late.  Jon saw.

 

She hugged her knees against herself and pressed her lips together; features hardened, even as Jon rotated toward her, opening like a sky after rain.  She stared hard, glassy-eyed, straight ahead of her.  Said nothing.

 

Jon was aware of the trauma she suffered during their time apart: the formative years of her adolescence, spent as hostage of the Lannisters, in the wake of her father's execution; her mistreatment by Joffrey; child marriage to Tyrion; escape into the treacherous machinations of Littlefinger, and subsequent marriage to Ramsay Bolton.  

 

No, not marriage.  Whatever transpired between her and Ramsay, it wasn't that.   She never went into detail.  She didn't need to.  He could remember the words of Ramsay's letter clearly, even as he had choked to hold them them back, even as she grabbed the paper from his hands and continued reading, voice oh-so steady.  When she said, on the eve of battle, "I'm not going back alive.  Do you understand me?"

 

Jon backed away from the fire.  He knew what followed would hang on how he manoeuvred around her battered boundaries.  But he didn't leave.  He waited for her to speak first.

 

"Don't."

 

"Don't ... what?"

 

"Say anything.  About it."  

 

The dead weight of her voice unnerved him.  He could handle the cautions and reserved queen, for she meant well, though he preferred the affection and exasperation of his once-sister, long-time friend, and forever companion.  The empty vessel was something else entirely.

 

He shrugged, even though she couldn't see it.  "What would I say?"

 

"Something.  Nothing."

 

Jon shifted his weight, and Sansa felt him move away but then he stopped.  Turned around.  The snap of leather and rustle of fabric..  When she looked at him, he had taken off his jerkin, unlaced his tunic, and lifted it over his head.

 

In the orange glow crimson scars smiled wretchedly at her, and she thought she would be sick.

 

But Jon pointed to each pink curve cut into his skin, one by one: "Allister.  Bowen.  Othel.  Olly...."

 

Tears clouded her eyes as he named each and every one of them -- every traitor who put a knife through him.

 

He finished his detailed inventory, tugged the tunic back over his head.  He seemed to walk over to her on the bridge of her gaze, knelt, and cautiously took her hand.

 

He asked quietly, "Is it like that ... everywhere?"

She nodded, up, down.  Nothing else on her face moved, save the treachery of tears.

 

He nodded his head; a begrudging gesture.  The frown of his mouth pressed deep and ugly, uglier even than the scars on his body.  But he closed his eyes and steadied himself.  The man who did that to her was dead.  What she needed from him now was something different.  

 

He held her hand up to his mouth and pressed it firm.  He counted his heartbeats,  _one, two...ten_ , before lowering her hand again.  He stood to leave.  But as he turned, her grasp on him tightened and yanked him back.  He looked down at her, sunk and shrunken, and there it was -- the brokenness, the shattered skeleton of her psyche trembling and shuddering through her, even as she tried to hold it together.  The glimpse of ruined skin on her shin, the lever; her carefully controlled and internalised pressure, the steam boiling to get out.  

 

So he knelt back down, even as she gripped him so hard his fingers numbed.  And Sansa's sobs moved soundlessly through her, quaking, so that Jon reached and pulled her to him, trying his best to absorb the damage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want so badly to deal with Sansa's trauma tenderly. Jon's too, as I'm entirely confident that his relationship depicted in S8 with Dany was an abusive one. If I handle it imperfectly, please forgive me.
> 
> Once again, un-betaed. Every time you comment, a plot bunny gets its wings.


	6. Chapter 6

 

She didn't fall asleep; she ceased to be awake.  Every part of her ached from the violence of swallowed sobs, skin alternating between hot and cold.  She didn't remember Jon helping her up and into the adjoining room, laying her down on the bed over the furs.  But he must have done, because a maidservant knew to come in in the night and peel the wet clothes from her and urge her to drink something warm from a cup.

 

By morning the snow was gone.  Sansa could smell it, the damp and mud-melt.  Her body weighed heavy with the hangover of crying.  She lay in bed until a handmaid came in with a pitcher; the woman went to work with blessed inattention, pouring fresh water into the washbasin, throwing a log to the fire, unfolding and setting out a forest green dress for her mistress.

 

Half the morning was gone by the time Sansa stepped out of her room.  Enough time for her battle-hardened soul to gather up its armor.  She picked up her pieces with the embroidery she left in the library and carried on, seamless.

 

She asked for food to be brought to the council room so she could eat while going over the morning's affairs.  When she went in her small council were already gathered, clumped off in pairs either discussing relevant affairs or ignoring them for more interesting jests and gossip.  The latter gathered themselves up and adjusted topics when she entered.  Jon was there too; he sat with his arms crossed, while the septon spoke to him.  He paid her no notice, and she asked herself if this wasn't worse than anything he could have said or done otherwise.  Before she could decide, the steward greeted her brightly, and Lord Manderly called the council to order.

 

When council settled into a more formal routine, he ravenmaster came in after knocking and handed Sansa a tightly rolled message, one which she was obliged to share right away.  A Dornish prince was coming.  He had intentions to seek the Queen in the North's hand in marriage.

 

***

 

The council shuffled out of the room, while Sansa remained.  Last night's evaporated tears settled around her in a fog, so she stretched her neck, first from one side, then to the other, trying to disperse it.  Jon, who'd been careful not to look at her, reached across the table for an apple and hung it in his mouth, leaving his hands free to pass over various accoutrements, gathering what he needed.

 

The last lord crossed out of the room, and it rushed out of Sansa:  "You're angry with me."

 

He glanced up.  Carefully took the apple from his mouth.  "No."  Now that he finally looked at her, it was steady, persistent.  The worst part of it was that it didn't feign to be cold or soft.  It just was, an openness that left her without footing.  If she knew what was expected of her, or even what wasn't, she could act on that.  It was his meeting her as an unknown without expectation that made her doubtful.  She, an experienced player of the game.

 

"But?"

 

He bit into the apple completely and shrugged.  "But nothing."

 

She furrowed her brows at him, studying.  "You're not going to tell me it's stupid to keep entertaining suitors?"

 

He chewed and swallowed.  "What do you want me to say, Sansa?  I've made my position on the matter pretty clear."

 

She threaded her fingers together on the table.  She wanted him to be angry.  Then she could be angry back at him and they could recline into their roles like the pieces on a game board.

 

As Jon made to leave, Sansa said, "I'm sorry about last night."  Her face burned; it pained her to speak of it out loud; calling it up gave it shape and substance.  But Jon hadn't wounded her with it yet.  Perhaps it was safe with him.

 

He looked at her, guileless.  "Don't be."  Then he tossed the apple to her.  

 

She caught it instinctively.  Round and russet in her hands, with a white indenture where he'd bitten it.  She smiled despite herself, and he had gone; so she sunk her teeth into the peel and bit a mouthful.

 

***

 

Jon was to ride out with the Winterfell company to Castle Black to trade the first fruits of spring with the Free Folk in exchange for pelts and game.  It was only sensible as he had the longest-standing established relationship with them; he had a vested interest in both sides; and if that wasn't enough, Tormund asked for him especially.  Jon voiced an interest in seeing how the new Night's Watch was faring.  There was no reasonable way to veto it, so Sansa held her tongue and pulled on her queenly cloak of disinterest.  In reality, it put Sansa on edge.  Distracted at council, listless at meals.  If she wasn't desperate for him not to leave, she was desperate not to appear clingy.  Her pride wouldn't allow it; but running underneath that was the fear that being overbearing would drive him away.  It was one thing to tell him she needed him; another to put her foot down like a spoilt child or a scolding mother and forbid him to go.

 

She asked him to supper a few nights before he was to leave, and despite her measured conversation, he divined her worry.  Either she was not so good at camouflage as she thought, or he'd learned to read it on her like ink on paper: the tightness around her mouth, the haughty tilt of her chin.  The more standoffish, the more desperate her self-preservation.  One part of him was offended, the part that promised again and again to protect her; but another part knew too well the need to raise the walls around.

 

He settled on reassuring her.  "I'm coming back, you know.  I wouldn't leave without telling you first."

 

She probed him wordlessly for weakness in his admission (because it would hurt, oh how it would hurt, to be taken by surprise without the chance at steeling herself).  But Jon couldn't be false.  It was one of the things, she thought fondly, that made it difficult for him to navigate the niceties or ruling when he'd been king.

 

Her mouth settled into a line.  "You will be back before this Dornish prince comes?"

 

"I'll do my best."

 

Her thin brows pinned their annoyance on him, and he conceded: "Don't make a decision without me."

 

***

 

She saw him off, giving last minute instructions to the riding party and insisting that the storekeeper go over the goods inventory a final time.  It delayed their departure, but no one dared grumble.  The gates opened and the wagons rolled out, flanked by riders in Winterfell livery.  Jon hung back on the gray horse while Sansa stood beside, her gloved hand looped through the strap of the stirrup.

 

"Be safe," she said, looking up at him.  

 

He bent over her upturned face and, unthinking, kissed her on the mouth, soft and brief.  There was no heat it it; it was the comfortable exchange of belonging.  As natural as breath.  She smiled undisturbed as he rode off.  And it didn't occur to either of them, until Jon was long gone through the gate and the sounds of hoofs faded over the horizon, that the ease with which it came to them might not be shared with the wider world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter, but I'm chasing the endorphin high of publication to keep up momentum.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sansa meets a good match.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really milked the inspiration dry there for a good while. We have Hattice and onhersleeve (and all you lovely commenters, ultimately) to thank for the breakthrough.

The suitor from Dorne was a relation of the ruling prince named Ilirio Martell.  He came with a moderate-sized retinue, for he came bearing gifts.  Silks and sweets and not least of these, lemons.  Young and handsome and full of song.  Sansa couldn't take him in at ease the way she had the others.  For Jon was still gone.

 

On the evening feast of his arrival, Sansa sat Ilirio next to her at table in the seat of honor, as per usual.  She smoothed her features and leveled her head, but she couldn't shake the abandoned feeling; she shouldn't be here alone.  She shouldn't have to entertain a strange man alone, in her home, with Jon gone.

 

Ilirio spoke easily of his country and his kin.  But after supper, he sipped his wine, and said, "I must admit, Your Grace, I am surprised not to find the man called Jon Snow here."

 

She must have reacted to the name on his lips, because his clever eyes sparkled.  "He is here, is he not?"

 

"Jon Snow is in residence at Winterfell, yes."

 

Illirio's coloring was like Jon's, with dark curls and even darker eyes.  Even the shape and size of their features were similar.  But the ease and confidence communicated with them made him look utterly different.  "Who is he to you?  If I may ask, Your Grace.  I've heard conflicting rumours.  His name suggests he is a bastard, but then the Spider spread word that he is a trueborn Targaryen.  Some call him your brother; others a cousin.  But the way news comes from the North, you'd think him the Lord of Winterfell."

 

"Jon Snow is my kinsman and closest confidant. He was raised by my father, Eddard Stark, with me, in Winterfell.  He is a facet of this place, as much as the foundations and the water pipes.  Any man that would wish to court me must have his approval."

 

"And yet ... he is not here."

 

Sansa put on the smile that reared back and curled like a snake.  "He will be."

 

Ilirio's intense scrutiny of her let off a little.  He sat back in the chair.  "Forgive me, Your Grace.  I've been rather impertinent."

 

"Yes," Sansa said cooly, her eyebrows straight as rods.  "You have."

 

***

 

Sansa was forced to entertain Ilirio for two days by herself.  He brought his own entertainment, at least, musicians and even an acrobat who could swallow fire and contort his body into painful shapes.  So she could fret with her attention undivided.

 

As soon as she heard word of Jon's return, she excused herself from Ilirio's side and went down to the courtyard.  She had to focus on the measure of her heartbeat to keep from running to him as he rode in, wind-tousled and wet.  She paced herself, meeting him just as he dismounted.  He saw the tightness of her body and took the warning.  He let her lean forward first before embracing her, but it was a formal gesture.

 

When she introduced him to Ilirio, the Dornish prince was all confidence and courtesy.  Jon's face betrayed little feeling, but he dipped his head in greeting before quickly excusing himself.

 

That night, when Jon came to her solar, he closed the door behind him but stayed there, almost on the threshold, waiting.

 

Sansa remained seated at her desk, and did not lift her eyes to him.  In her hurt, she felt vindictive, childish.  She resolved to win the game of who-speaks-first.  It wasn't hard.

 

"You can be such a spiteful woman sometimes, you know that?"

 

She slammed her hands on the table and shoved to stand.  "You said you'd be back before he arrived!"

 

"I said I'd  _try_."

 

This she couldn't counter with words, so she put her fight into her scowl.

 

Jon chose not to engage her.  Instead, he walked to the fireside and leaned over, bracing himself on the mantle.  "How has it gone?"

 

"Fine.  He asked after you."

 

"Me?"

 

"Yes because you  _weren't here_."

 

"So it's my fault, is it?"

 

"Yes!"  At the cathartic outburst, she at last felt some relief.  With relief came awareness and humility.  She dragged her glance over him in blatant disapproval, but her tone was soft.  "You've got a tear in your sleeve."

 

Jon looked where she indicated lazily, as if he were only obligated to notice because she had.

 

Sansa went to her chest, dipped in, and pulled out an article of clothing.  She walked to him and motioned with her fingers.  "Give it here."

 

He obeyed, unhooking his jerkin and lifting the tattered shirt over himself, handing it to her.  She gave him the clean shirt and retreated to the bed with her embroidery basket.  Jon put the provided shirt on and turned back to the mantelpiece.  A hand hovered over the dusty objects.  He picked one up, set it down: first a carved wolf, then a tin vessel.

 

"Well I'm here now.  How are you finding him?"

 

With a thin exhale, she threaded her needle.  "Other than the first night, he's been more than courteous.  He is generous with his attentions but doesn't overstep me; I thought perhaps he'd treat me like the others, like a bit of a mummer's queen, as I am only a woman.  But then, in Dorne, their ways are much different.  His own mother was a legitimised bastard."

 

She measured out a careful moment to give Jon a chance to respond.  When he said nothing, she went on, "He brings some tempting offers: free trade with Dorne, the connection to an great house, and a reinforced blood union with the Six Kingdoms."

 

"But do you like him?"

 

She would have searched his face for his meaning, but he still faced the fire.

 

"I like him all right."  The pace of her stitches picked up.

 

"Enough to marry him?"

 

Sansa yelped.  She'd plunged the vicious needle straight into her finger.  Before she even knew this, however, Jon was standing over her, trying to catch her hand, which she waved about in the air in front of her, as if to shake off the pain.

 

"Let me see."

 

He gripped her hand in his, and she let him examine the fingertip, on which a fat pearl of blood trembled.  Nothing about the frown of his brow altered.  So she had no warning  when he lifted her finger and placed it carefully in his mouth, wrapping his tongue around it.  A queer feeling churned in her gut, some relation of the sensation of fear.  There were traces of trepidation, as she had felt when Littlefinger looked at her askance, or when Ramsay Bolton brushes his fingertips on her skin far too softly.  But it mixed with a kind of contented resignation that was so characteristic of all her and Jon's interactions.  He pulled her finger out through pursed lips and studied it again.

 

"It's fine."  He brushed his thumb over it and dropped her hand.  It fell limp into her lap.  

 

He returned to the fireside, and Sansa picked up her needle.  But she had to work for a good two minutes before the fuzziness between her ears dispersed.

 

***

 

On the feast of the third night entertaining Prince Ilirio, Jon brooded more than usual.  She would have seethed in her annoyance except that the relief of having him there weakened her resolve.  He sat, sullen, staring into his cup.  Between them sat Ilirio, who himself demanded no small amount of attention from her.  Sansa felt the telltale sting in her cheeks from hours of formal smiling.

 

"You are a very beautiful woman."  Ilirio leaned in, voice low.  "I should like very much to make love to you."

 

A wall of heat hit her full on, leaving her without footing and scrambling for a response.  What came out was not courteous but very much in character.  "Is that your only requirement for lovemaking?  Physcial beauty?"

 

He shook his head, and his merry eyes looked all the darker for their shift in gravity.  "No.  But I want you to know that I seek you for yourself, and not your titles, or your crown, or whatever status you could give me."

 

Sansa swallowed with difficulty.  Her discomfort was not entirely unpleasant.

 

"I would speak with you in private," he said.  The timbre of his voice reminded her of wine.  "It is loud and close in here."

 

"Very well," she said slowly, "you may come to the solar with myself and Jon when it is time to retire."

 

***

 

If Jon was displeased with the addition to their routine, he did not make it known.  He walked behind at a respectful distance while Iliro led Sansa down the corridors to the solar on his arm.  Inside the cozy and well-furnished chamber, Sansa pushed some high-backed chairs around a small table and set out cups with a pitcher of wine.  Ilirio took the seat offered him, but Jon hung back around the periphery, eventually settling by window, facing the door.  The thought passed fleetingly before she could examine it, that seemed to be guarding all the means of escape.

 

Ilirio poured himself a cup.  He was sloppy, splashing wine onto the table, in the way that privileged people do.  "Let us speak plainly, Your Grace.  You have many offers of marriage but none that match mine in opportunity and suitability.  I am close to you in age, never married, and have wealth and status of my own, so no need of yours.  I can make a wedding present to you of one hundred and ten acres of grove land in the country outside of Sunspear, and the household accompanying it.  I require no dowry of you but yourself.  I would be loyal to you, and devoted, and father your children happily under the name Stark.  You should want for nothing."

 

When she held out the silence, he urged, "Treat with me."

 

Sansa's answer was an obvious recitation.  "Your offer is very tempting, my Lord.  I must bring the terms of your proposal to my advisers before making a decision."

 

"Surely a queen can know her own mind."  Ilirio cast a look to the shadowed corner that housed Jon, even as he leaned in and put his hand over hers.  "I think you could love me.  I know I could love you."

 

The words touched her.  For a moment, her careful guard shifted, and she felt a tenderness toward him.  His face was cunning but not cruel.  He didn't believe himself to be lying.  Perhaps he wasn't.

 

Then she pulled her hand away.  "I'm tired," she said, standing abruptly.  "I shall retire now.  Jon, please will you see me to my chambers?"

 

***

 

They didn't speak until they were behind yet another closed door.  Sansa felt the familiar panic inching back into her -- the noxious cocktail of closeness and terror from when the rooms of this place were her prison and not her safety.  She held her hands against the wood of the door for several moments, breathing, allowing herself to comprehend she could, at any moment, open the door if she wished and go out again.  When she felt stable, she turned round.  But Jon did not find a place as was his usual way.  He stood uneasily, unanchored in the center of the room.

 

"Well?" she began.

 

"Well?"

 

"I do not doubt there is good in him.  And his offers are more than generous."

 

"Aye, they are that." 

 

"W-what do you mean?"  It was not the response she expected.

 

"Just as you've said.  His offer is good."

 

She worked her mouth noiselessly for a moment.  "So you think his price matches my value."  Her tone pressed like the dull of edge of a blade.

 

"Aye, and you could never want for lemon cakes or song or poetry."

 

She drew nearer with two steps.  "Is that all you have to say?  No other insights?"

 

"It is as he said," Jon said flatly.  "The queen can make up her own mind.  You would do well to marry him."

 

"I don't know that I want to."

 

"Since when has that come into the equation?"  No slap ever stung her as that in that moment.

 

"So that's it?  After all that?  After picking over ever fault and folly these past moons, combing mercilessly through men who laid themselves and what little they have out for my consideration and scrutiny -- you've decided to stop caring  _now_?  You're just going to say,  _marry him_ , without even giving me a glimpse into your mind?"

 

"This is my mind."  The hardness of his voice gripped her heart like a fist.  "Wed him.  And be done with it."

 

The wideness of her eyes gave way to mist.  The mist burned like steam.  But she held in the tears.  "Why," her voice broke and collapsed to a whisper, "why would you hurt me like that?"

 

It stuck like an arrow through a chink in armour.  Everything in him sunk, earthward, as if his weight was of the sudden even too much for him to bear.  "I don't -- I don't know, Sansa.  I'm sorry."

 

She took a shuddering breath.  In two strides, he had her, one hand pressed between her shoulder blades and the other on the back of her head, dipping it into the curve where his neck and shoulder met.  She screwed up her face against his skin, forbidding the wetness to taint him.  He rocked her a little, as though she were a child in need of comforting.

 

When she felt she had control of the tears, she untucked her head from his neck to regard him with glazed eyes.  His chest heaved against her own, bobbing her up, down.  When he let her go it was to hold her at arm's distance, to make sure she saw him.  "I've only just met the man.  I need more time with him.  And when I know it myself, I  _promise_ \-- I will share my mind with you."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It sounds so thirsty, but it's true, so I'll keep saying it. Comments fuel motivation like coffee fuels the universe.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ilirio makes an impression.

Jon wanted to put distance between Sansa and Ilirio, and that agitated him.  It sat uneasily in the back of his mind refusing to be slotted into the bigger picture.  When Sansa pressed him for his opinion, he grew short.  The things she said were not in and of themselves offensive: on the contrary, the prince's suit seemed to meet Jon's criteria for a successful match in every way, better than he could have imagined.  Ilirio was interested in Sansa: not the queen, but the woman.  Jon could read the interest off of him like steam rising off the back of a boar in winter.  But then the lean of the man's body in the candlelit solar, the reach of his hand to hers, could have lit a flame of irritation that would burn Jon alive for days.

 

Ilirio was too forward, Jon decided.

 

Jon's mind had been much occupied while he was away, but Tormund found the opportunity to siphon him off from his duties and put a drink in him.  The Wildling had grown shabbier still, if that were even possible.  The sharp slant of his eyebrows gave him the look of a man who at any minute might turn mad.

 

They clustered around a small scratch of fire, hastily built, just enough to bide off the cold.  It was spring but winter crept back with the disappearance of the sun at dusk and sunk its teeth in.

 

Tormund handed Jon the skin flask.  "I hear rumor from the South that that sister-cousin of yours is on the hunt for a husband."

 

Jon took a particularly long swig from the flask.  "Aye."

 

"And what about you, Snow?  Fancy a Wildling wife?  Or at least a proper turn with one?"

 

Jon laughed dryly.  Shook his head.  "No.  I'm done with all that.  I've had plenty women, enough for a lifetime."

 

"Two!" Tormund cackled.  "You've had two, for fuck's sake.  A man who can ride a dragon ought not to be so afeared of riding women."

 

Jon glowered.  "I won't--"

 

"I know, I  _know_ , you won't father any bastards."

 

They were quiet for a while.  Jon thought he heard the howl of a wolf a long way off.  He said, "Sansa doesn't want to marry, not really.  She asked me if I would take a wife, and thereby provide heirs for the North, for Winterfell."

 

"Sounds like a pretty good bargain."

 

Jon rubbed his arms.  But it only sunk the cold in deeper.

 

Tormund's eyebrow peaked into triangles.  "Go on, then.  What's the problem with it?"

 

"Marrying.  Getting children.  It's something I've wanted for as long as I can remember.  But it's an artefact, a trace of a life that ended years ago, something that died with me in the flames.  No, I'd be a hollow sort of husband, and a distant father.  I'd be cold and unfeeling and cruel.  But Sansa.  She could be warm again.  She's got it in her, even after everything, if only it can be kindled.  And she deserves to be happy."

 

Tormund was looking at him with a kind of wild stupor.  Jon moved uneasily.  "What?"

 

But Tormund stood and waved his hands as if to wash them of the whole affair.  "You're an idiot, little crow.  A right and proper fool if there ever was one."

 

***

 

The next day brought light rain and a Jon mild and attentive.  He made an effort to arrive on time for breakfast and answered in complete sentences when spoken to.  He even noticed the dress Sansa wore.  

 

She'd chosen something different that morning, when her maid laid out her usual gray, quilted garments.  Sansa paused before putting it on; a thought came to her, unbidden, of how Ilirio would react to her appearance.  It both repelled and drew her; against her better judgement, she called the maid back and asked for her to pull out something new.  

 

The maid unwrapped a parcel that had been stowed away upon Ilirio's arrival.  Her audible gasp garnered Sansa's attention.  Sansa pulled back the corner of paper, and -- a gash of sun spilled over dunes, a deep saffron whispering of heady, humid days and nights moved over by ocean breeze.  Sansa touched the fabric.  It was smooth but not yielding.  She asked the maid to unfold it and hold it out.  To her surprise, though the fabric and color were luxurious, the rest of it was practical, modest even, cut in the northern style.

 

"I'll wear this one," she told her maid.

 

When she looked at herself in the mirror, she saw for the first time in ages what others must have when they looked upon her: a pale but even-featured face; soft pink mouth; broad forehead; eyes standing out in startling blue; rich red hair set off by the deep yellow of the gown.  Maybe she was still beautiful.

 

Now Jon joined her at table, staring none too politely, and she heated for her earlier foolishness.  "You look..." he began.

 

"It was a gift," she cut him off quickly, for nothing that followed could have been tactful or complimentary.

 

He pressed his lips together and lifted his brows, as if to throw up hands would be too much effort.

 

When Ilirio came in, followed by his household, and late to table, he stopped dead on the threshold.  Sansa turned her head to the side and down, doing her best to convey how very little she noticed him.  Ilirio crossed the hall straight toward her and came around the table.  But he didn't take his place.  Instead he knelt and gathered her hand with an exaggerated show of chivalry.  "My Queen," he said.  "You show me a great honor by wearing my gift.  I feel I could forgo all food and live only on the nourishment of the sight of you for days and days."

 

Sansa kept her eyes down where she could avoid his heated gaze.  "I thank you, my Lord, but please.  There is no need to make a fool of yourself.  Now, sit.  We've much to attend to today, and you're already late."

 

Iliro sprung up with a grin dripping in self satisfaction.  He took his seat, as usual, between herself and Jon.  From her angle she could no longer see the look on his face, but the cast in Jon's eyes told her that they communicated wordlessly.  Jon only turned to his meal.  And despite his assertions otherwise, Ilirio ate heartily.

 

***

 

The rain pulled back and the earth dried up.  Sansa, the new steward, an Adyn Slate, Jon, and Ilirio Martell circled the grounds of the keep; the queen had various small things to attend to that had gone un-looked after while she entertained.  Ilirio insisted on escorting her; and so for practical reasons, his role in household affairs and their agreement that he should play chaperone, Jon came as well.

 

As they passed the training yard, Ilirio turned to Jon and said, "Lord Snow, would you indulge me with a game of swords?"

 

Jon's eyes lingered on the Dornish man's before seeking out Sansa for approval.

 

"I'd rather you didn't, my Lord--"

 

"Please!  I hear Jon Snow is the finest swordsman in Westeros.  Is that not how he took back this keep in the Battle of the Bastards?  I should like to see his skill with my own eyes."

 

"I'm certain your skill at swordsmanship rivals my own, my Lord," Jon said.

 

"Nonsense.  I would have your tutelage."

 

Sansa closed her mouth in defeat.  Jon was already down the stairs into the training yard, hand on the pommel of Longclaw.

 

"Ah--but not steel!"  Sansa called after them.  "Use the training swords!"

 

Illirio followed closely on Jon's heels, and behind his ear he spoke, "Women have a secret strength but they mistake their tenderness for our own, do they not?  We do not injure easily.  I would have you show me with real steel."

 

Jon pivoted swiftly, forcing Ilirio to draw an abrupt halt.  His own sword was at his belt, and he readied his hand over it with long brown fingers.  Jon gave a brief nod; swords were drawn; and the dance began.

 

Up on the balcony, Sansa gripped the stone wall and watched unhappily, though without surprise.  Men seldom listened to women, even queens.  Usually she enjoyed watching Jon spar.  He was graceful and swift, and the things he did with his body astounded her.  She was not his only admirer.  She noticed some of the girls and women stopped when they saw him training.  She recognized on the younger ones the listless look she'd worn for Loras.

 

Now, she knew Jon was handsome.  That was an objective fact.  But it didn't much affect her; you get used to a thing of beauty and it's no longer a whole, to be taken in all at once, but a series of encounters and disjointed traits, and that's the way it was with Jon.  The twitch of a smile on the corner of his mouth; the coils of his hair, mesmerising like a charmer's snake; him blinking up to look at her when she'd called him out or he thought he'd been subtle -- the tilt of him, weighed down by gravity more than his small frame should have been, so that you had to pull him up to engage you.  

 

Except when he was angry.  When he was angry he forgot the downward pull and looked you head on, without flinching.  And when he was fighting -- well, it was as though gravity had never held him at all.  

 

No, she didn't see a beautiful man when she saw Jon.  She just saw him.  And all the things that made him beautiful.

 

Ilirio too moved beautifully.  But it was with an awareness that Jon lacked -- almost performative.  Sansa thought it diminished his grace.  

 

Her pulse picked up as their strikes intensified.  Something was wrong.  They moved much too quickly.  She saw Ilirio pull back and hit Jon in the torso with the pommel of his sword.  Jon staggered but kept to his feet.  This was bad -- if he was angered --

 

"Enough," she whispered.  Then again, with force and volume: "Enough!"

 

Jon halted abruptly but Ilirio rocked a bit on his heels, disoriented.  

 

"Thank you, my lords.  But that is enough for today."

 

Jon sheathed Longclaw and turned his back to his opponent; gave a curt nod toward Sansa before heading back up the stairs.  After two gasps, Ilirio too bowed, and shadowed Jon's footsteps back up to Sansa.

 

***

 

Ilirio didn't press her for an answer and for that she was grateful.  He seemed content to fall in step behind her, watching her work; and when she caught his eyes, she thought she recognised the slightest gleam of admiration.

 

She was well tired by the end of the day, so she instructed for the household and the guests to be fed, while inviting her companions to dine in her solar where they could relax at ease away from the tiny, understandable needs and expectations of subjects.  Spring had yielded a good crop, and there was plenty food; which was good because the Dornishmen believed in eating and drinking.  Well.  No different from Northmen there.

 

Maester Wolkan and Wyman Manderly joined Jon, Ilirio, and Sansa over a roasted ham and apples.  Talk flowed freely between the men, the more the wine flowed, the freer the talk.  Lord Manderly's booming laugh and hearty toasts filled any leftover silences.  Soon, he was calling for a song.

 

"Let us hear the Dornishman's Wife," he said, folding his thick fingers over the bulge of his belly.  "I would hear it from out of the purple throat of a Dornishman himself."

 

Master Wolkan said, "Ah, but it is much too course.  We are in the presence of a lady."  

 

"Not just any lady, a queen," Ilirio corrected.  He held his glass up to her in deference.

 

"My lords, do not deny yourselves on my behalf.  Though if you feel the subject too bawdy, my prince, perhaps you would sing something else for us?"

 

"Anything for you, Your Grace.  But it is known that you yourself posses the voice of a songbird.  Will you sing with me?"

 

"All right, then.  Let us sing together."

 

Ilirio stood and held out his hand for Sansa.  He led her to an opening in the solar that was clear of furniture and bodies, as the others adjusted their chairs and refilled their goblets.  He set the the note, low and steady, and when it was time for Sansa to join in, he indicated to her with lifted brows and she came in strong and clear withe the harmony.  Their voices mingled.  Undiluted pleasure spread in the man's face. When they finished, the absence of all sound save for the popping fire closed the room like a heavy cloak.  It held for nearly a minute.  Then Lord Manderly clapped, slowly, his big hands cracking the silence.

 

"Marvelous," he said.  "A marvelous duet."  And he exchanged a meaningful look with Maester Wolkan.

 

Ilirio and Sansa returned to their seats, but the jesting and banter and gossip went on long into the night.  When someone's cup dried up, Ilirio was there at the elbow to refill it, sloshing, to the rim.  Once or twice he said something that seemed out of place, and Sansa couldn't discern his meaning.  But Jon would tense and grip his cup, as if this were a secret meant only for him.  Perhaps it was just the wine.

 

Sansa managed to keep her wits about her by drinking slowly, thereby avoiding too many refills.  At last she stood, pushing back her chair, and the men bumbled out of their seats to rise for her.  "Thank you, my lords, it has been an enjoyable evening.  But it is time for me to retire."

 

She could see that Jon was far gone, so she asked the maester to escort her back to her chamber and bid them all goodnight.

 

***

 

Something woke her from a dreamless sleep.  She sat up and listened.  Ghost' growled low and scratched at the door.  Sansa pulled on a robe; opened the door a crack.  The direwolf sped out.  The hall was deep with black and silence.  Ghost's nails clattered on the cobbles.  He halted, and looked over his shoulder, expectant.  Sansa knew she oughtn't be wandering about at night.  But she couldn't bring herself to care much for decorum with Ghost so tense and insistent.

 

He led her through the back corridors down toward the inner bailey.  He nosed the door.  Sansa unbolted it, and the wolf darted out.  She heard something, ringing, in intermittent staccato.  She followed the sounds.

 

In the corner where the wood piled, prepared for drying and seasoning, she saw Jon.  The slouch of his shoulders, the curl of his locks, unmistakable.  He drew the axe high over his head and brought it down merciless force.  Then up again and down again.  Over and over, picking up pace, until she thought he'd split his own back with the violence of it.

 

"Jon," she came toward him.

 

He swung harder.

 

"Jon...?"

 

Again and again -- he was not himself. He was driven.  

 

"Jon!"  She put her hand palm-out in caution.  She gave him a wide girth and drew closer to him from the side, so as not to startle him.  When he was still she gripped his wrist as tight as she could and shook it, trying to get him to let go the axe.

 

To her astonishment he began to weep.  He tossed the axe, blade down, to the ground, and she felt the sweep of anger drown him, pulling him under.  So she did the only thing she could to keep him afloat.  She put her arms around him, as he had wrapped his arms round her.

 

It was a gamble, she knew, because Jon had never known comfort.  Even in their childhoods, when they had fallen and scraped their knees, they could all of them run to their mother, who would sooth them.  Or give them sugared almonds, if all else failed.  Even Septa Mordane could be moved with a bit of doing.  But Jon had only Father.  And Father couldn't give a woman's comfort.  Not the kind longed for by a small and affection-starved boy.

 

Jon didn't know how to be vulnerable.  He resisted her violently.  But she wouldn't leave off.  She pressed him with so much force of will and body that to break away or shove her off of him would have bruised her skin and snapped her bones.  At last, he collapsed inward; his arms gave up fighting; and he let her to hold him.

 

He sobbed, a feral, forlorn sound muffled by the fabric on her shoulder.

 

***

 

They made a striking contrast to the last time they snuck in, stifling laughter, light and quick as birds.  Now they were heavy, sullen, and slow, as Sansa guided him back to his chamber.  She closed the door softly.  Jon sunk onto the bed, and put his head in his hands.

 

"Talk to me," she said; not without gentleness, but it was not a request.

 

Without lifting his face, he murmured, "It's nothing, I'm sorry to worry you.  It was the alcohol -- too much wine tonight."  He looked up now, and she could see the raw red rim of his eyelids.  "Sometimes I get caught in a cycle of remembering; and then I start spiralling, spiralling downward until I land in a sea of fire and everything's consumed."  His voice cracked, but he shook his head -- as if beating his brains against the walls of his skull would kill the memory of war and betrayal.

 

She sat next to him; folded her hands in her lap; and let her eyes trail from her knees to his, then up to his face.  But he was looking elsewhere.

 

"Daenerys?"

 

He didn't reply.  He didn't need to.

 

"You loved her so much," Sansa said.  She forced her voice to take on the quality of air.  "But any choice you made was going to crush you."  She shook her head.  "It isn't fair.  I'm not asking for it to be fair.  But I am asking for you to  _try_ to be happy."

 

"I don't know that that's possible."

 

"Gods, won't you  _try_?"

 

The vehemence behind it made him snap his eyes to her.  Her chin quivered, but her irises bore into him.

 

Without waiting for a response, she slid from the bed and sunk to the floor, reclining on her knees.  She began unlacing his boots.

 

"You don't have to do that," he said.  His voice strained at the seams with weariness.  "I can manage."  But he made no move to stop her.

 

"Why help  _me_ to bed?  Surely the Dornishman could do with a lady to sooth his splitting head and chasten away his nightmares?"

 

Sansa rolled her eyes upward.  "Even if that were so -- if Ilirio were a broken war hero stalled in the crossroads of trauma and about at night -- I'm not going to lead a man into his sleeping chamber and put him to bed -- not even a guest.  Hospitality has its limits.  Certainly decency is one of them."

 

His face twitched in the way it did when he was trying -- slowly -- to grasp a concept.

 

"Am I not a man?"

 

"Yes, but you are different."

 

He blinked.  "How?  How am I different?"

 

Sansa swallowed.  How to put it?  "You do not think of me in the way that a man thinks of a woman."

 

The twitch again.  "What do you mean by  _that_?"

 

"Honestly, Jon.  I am no summer maid.  I am no maid at all, but a ruined woman -- no, don't protest, I would do without false chivalry tonight.  It's merely true.  There was a time when I thought songs were the measure of the way a man loved.  But that was a long time ago, and worlds away now.  I know the way in which a man wants a woman.  

 

"I know the way a woman should err to caution with a man."

 

He watched her finish her work.  But as she rose and left, the choke in his throat, which had subsided with her steady, insistent affection -- her gentle and guiding hands -- doubled back, stronger than ever.

 

***

 

Jon, too, knew the way in which a man wanted a woman.  

 

From the earliest days, when he and Robb and Theon were old enough to accompany Vayon Poole into the fields, they watched the animals rutting.  Not many years later, they came to learn that human men were likewise preoccupied with coupling.  And much more vocal about it.  

 

Robb had been courteous, playful, shy.  All the daughters in the keep and Wintertown were in love with him.  His Lady mother's steady influence and his father's watchful eyes kept him chaste.  

 

Theon, however, had no such scruples.  Jon suspected his list of conquests were significantly less than what he boasted, but then again -- he never turned down an offer.

 

Jon did not know a woman, though he felt the pull, as youth does.  He had promised himself, before he even comprehended full significance of it, that he would never father a bastard.  Any time the longing stirred him, he need only recall his lonely and driftless childhood.

 

The girls were different.  Arya and Sansa were raised apart -- at least until Arya was big and vocal enough to do as she pleased.  But Sansa had always seemed mild and reticent.  Her sphere followed a separate orbit to his own, and rarely ever touched.  She was an alien creature to him then, like an exotic animal in a menagerie.  Sometimes glimpsed at the end of the room or met when their paths crossed or followed those of their siblings.  He didn't think of Sansa like that, like a  _woman_ , like the rest.

 

He'd hardly thought of her like that when she showed up at Castle Black, a woman grown, pursued by a slighted husband.  She was a woman, yes, but there was a coolness to her, a frigidity which he supposed was the result of her mixed upbringing and tragic abuse.  Her coolness could dampen the hottest wretch's desire.  That and her flashing, perceptive eyes that could cut through a man.  (Was that Littlefinger's part in her deflowering?)  

 

But more powerful than her winter demeanor was the astonishing fact that she was so much herself.  He'd been conditioned all his life not to imagine any kind of meaningful relationship between them.  Then he found her quiet, insistent presence was a solid, living thing.  It took up all of his attention.

 

How had he never noticed before?  He was ashamed that he had tucked her away to her woman's world and not given her a chance to show him how very alive, how very full she was.  Because she had not brought that fullness to him, as did Arya, did not make it any less real.

 

He had thought on her abuse at the hands of Ramsay but never allowed himself to linger.  The letter confirmed his worst suspicions.  But it didn't occur to him until last night; that this was all she knew of a man's embrace: pain, humiliation, terror.  A ruthless want that had no care for her well-being.  It shook him to know that running in her always, as she went about her to-ings and fro-ings, threading its poison in her blood, the belief that some essential and private part of her was an unclosed wound, waiting bravely to be hurt again.  He wanted to shake her and show her herself, naked as her name-day, and tell her,  _you are good.  All of you is good_.

 

He could hardly fault her, then, for naming him the only man she trusted.  Ser Davos and Bran were out of reach, Father was dead, and she was protected from any threat in that regard from himself by their upbringing.  By the word  _sister_.  The thought brewed, mellow and sour.  Jon was glad of it, glad of her ease with him.  But -- if he had been just another man, would she have mistrusted him, too?  It sickened him to think of what his simple kiss goodbye -- any touch or look between them, any innocent yet sincere intimacy -- could do to her if he had been just another man.  And that barb dug in his flesh and worried a trail to his core.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do please indulge the urge to pick apart every tiny thing you liked about this chapter. ;) Or even the things you didn't (but be kind about it?)!
> 
> BTW, feel free to follow or message on tumblr, I'm TheOriginalSuki there too. These kids and their modern micro-blogging!


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon and Sansa reach an understanding.

Jon slept little, but he did dream.  He dreamed he was dead again.  Laid out on a slab in the cellar-cold of Castle Black, naked as a newborn.  He knew he was dead; yet he was aware of everything, everything.  He heard their voices discussing him, mourning him, but he couldn't move, couldn't speak to respond to them, tell them,  _I'm still here.  I'm in here.  I just need a bit of warmth_.  He saw, though the membranes of his eyelids, the shadows cast, mocking the images of the living.  He saw the Red Woman.  She washed him, whispering to herself -- no, praying.  Then the Red Woman was Sansa.  And instead of the praying, of the waiting, it was the washing, the lingering trace of her fingers on his flesh, luring the life back into him, limb by limb.

 

He was up and washed and cleanly dressed with the morning dew.  He sought out Sansa's handmaid and told her not to check in on her at the usual hour.

 

"Let her sleep," he said, "and wake when she is ready.  I'll take the blame if she's cross."

 

The second thing he did was seek out Ilirio.  

 

He found his men out in the courtyard detaining the servant girl carrying buckets of slop to the pigsty.  The men needn't wonder what caused the blushing girl to drop her eyes and scurry off.  Jon Snow was soon among them, demanding to see their lord and master.  They told him he'd gone to walk in the godswood, an answer that failed to loosen the frown from his face.

 

Jon indeed found Ilirio in the godswood, beneath the weirwood tree of all places.  Dressed, as always, in rich fabric cut just so, to accentuate the lines of him, like the body of a cat.  He clasped his hands behind his back, head titled -- he couldn't be praying?

 

Jon drew up behind him and waited.  He could tell by the man's shoulders that his presence was known.

 

Ilirio turned around slowly, his face serene.  The perpetual half-smile on him.

 

Jon's body grew taut as a bow, but he kept his distance.  "What are your intentions with the queen?"

 

Ilirio let his smile unroll fully, a smile that came so easily to him, so effortless.  Why could Jon not smile like that?   _What do you want that you do not have?_

 

Ilirio said,  "At last, we speak plainly."

 

Jon cocked his head to the side, and a smile of his own flashed across his mouth before falling again, like a dropped knife.  "Well?"

 

"I should think it's obvious."

 

"Not to me.  I don't know you, or your customs, or your character."

 

"And what about you, Lord Snow?  What are your intentions?"

 

"My intentions remain what they have always been: to protect her, and to serve her, and to serve and protect the North."

 

"The North," Ilirio nodded, smiling to himself.  "You were the King in the North once, were you not?  You could have taken the name Stark, then.  A name that would have legitimised you in the laws of this land.  It would have put your claim ahead of Queen Sansa's, in the case of any future instability or upheaval.  I understand that how things unfolded after were many and convoluted, so I won't pretend to know the outcome of such a move.  But it does make me wonder what your purpose is in being here.  Our queen is a discerning and intelligent woman and perfectly capable of ruling by herself, is she not?  Perhaps, you would like to be king?"

 

Jon narrowed his eyes at him, mistaking his meaning.  "Don't speak treason."

 

Ilirio laughed, and Jon clenched and unclenched his fists.  They were howling for Longclaw, but Jon kept his head.

 

"So.  Why are you here?"

 

"She asked me to stay, to find her a good husband.  And that is what I intend to do."

 

That infuriating smile.  "And do I pass your approval, my lord?"

 

Silent as a dagger, Jon leaned forward.  His face hovered an inch from Ilirio's.  His breath came hot and sharp on him and Ilirio thought,  _ah, so here is the dragon_.  But he did not flinch.

 

"If you hurt her .... if you earn her trust with false promises and sweet glances, and then betray it ... I will kill you, slowly and painfully."

 

"I am sure you will, my lord."

 

Ilirio saw the way Jon conspicuously held his hands, away from the hilt of the sword in his belt.  He hovered before him a moment longer before snapping away and crashing a path through the morning woods back to the castle.

 

***

 

The small council was to meet just before noon in the usual place, so refreshments were brought in and the fire built up.  The day continued to be a mirror image as the night had been, with her late rising, unclear head, and strain in her shoulders.  She was there before Jon this time, however, and she sat in the tall-backed chair, quietly brooding, while her men bustled around her, readying themselves and greeting their peers.  The council would want to know her decision regarding Prince Ilirio.  Most of them expressed mistrust in a match from the South, but she wondered if the past few days of Ilirio's stay might have warmed them to it.

 

Where she sat, she was in a good position to see Jon as he came through the door.  What happened next played out like a dream sequence.  As if Ilirio's performance at breakfast the other day were a grotesque echo, bounced into the past.  When Jon did it, it was not smooth; it came out of him, organic but clumsy.  The way he stopped abruptly on the threshold to take her in.  Jolted forward with purposeful strides.  Came to her around the table.  He knelt a little to put himself level with her eyes.  Weaving his fingers through hers, he brought their joined palms up to press a hard kiss to the back of hand.  She couldn't have broken eye contact if she wanted to.  He had a grappling hook to her sheer rock face, and he knew the way in.

 

It didn't scare her.  It only made her want to ease the way for him.

 

She leaned forward oh-so-slightly and spoke softly to him, only to him.  " _Promise me_ , you'll come to me next time."

 

He held her hostage with his eyes.  "Only if you promise you'll come to me as well."

 

She let out a little breath -- between a laugh and an exasperated sigh -- smiled begrudgingly, and nodded.

 

This persuaded him to release her from scrutiny.  He squeezed her hand and kissed it once more, before letting it go to stand and take his place at the council table.

 

Their meeting was called to order soon afterward, and they went through their usual rota: complaints brought before the Crown being her least favourite; the account live births, both of babe and beast being the most.   Then they came to the part Sansa awaited with trepidation.  Maester Wolkan cleared his throat and stood.  "We do have another matter to bring forward for consideration today.  That is, the offer of betrothal from Iliro Martell of Dorne.  Each of us, no doubt, has his own opinion about the suitability of such a match.  But we should like to hear the views of the queen."

Her palms grew cold.  She nodded, and Maester Wolkan made a little bow and sat down.

 

"Thank you, Maester Wolkan.  These past few days Prince Ilirio has been our esteemed guest.  He has showed us courtesy and generosity and a healthy respect for and interest in the ways of the North.  I am pleased to bring before you offers of no small means: lands, trade deals, things that could benefit our kingdom immensely.  He is prepared to relinquish his name for that of Stark should there be any issue.  I ... have to say that I myself find him quite amenable."

 

A few murmurs rose in the room.

 

"I would hear your thoughts on the matter, my lords."

 

Lord Manderly, who made it a point to be present in Winterfull long and often, spoke at once:  "I must say, surprised as I am, that I agree with the queen.  My lords, you know that I am loyal to the North.  Had I not already been married, young and handsome as I am, I'd have offered myself to Her Grace at once!"  Here, a pause, to allow for congenial laughter.  "So I am very heartened to hear that our good queen finds this Martell prince so agreeable.  He is no dapper fool, as we expected such a one from Dorne to be; I have not heard him speak ill of our country or our Queen; and he brings many practical benefits.  I should think mingling a bit of the exotic with the Stark blood should strengthen it.  Of course, the final decision is up to the Crown."  He sat when finished, indicating for the others to now dissect his opinion.

 

The others made cases of similar surprise and cautious optimism.

 

When Jon's turn came to speak, he didn't stand right away.  He slumped back in his chair and put a fist to his mouth, deep in thought.  Sansa felt every moment that slipped away was a phase of the moon.  Then he said, "My lords ... Your Grace ... I do not mean to dismiss your favourable views, but I strongly suggest approaching such a tie with utmost caution.  The man has been present a mere five days.  I should like to see how he takes to Winterfell after a long period of time, away from the luxuries of his homeland, not as a pampered guest, but as a willing subject of our Queen."

 

"What do you suggest, Snow?"

 

"Six months.  It is not unheard of for a marriage to be postponed for long periods of time."

 

"In the case of children betrothed at early ages, perhaps, but--"

 

"I should think no amount of time is too long to be sure of the honour of a man who would wed your Queen, Lord Manderly."

 

Sansa spoke now, holding her voice as evenly as possible: "And what, should we eschew all other proposals in the meantime?  Will he stay here at the expense of my hardworking people?"

 

Jon frowned at her.  "Your people are surely grateful we take a careful approach to such a delicate matter.  It behoves them to see the right man sit beside their Queen.  Let us not forget; once married, there is no undoing it.  A poor choice in marriage is not just an inconvenience to the parties involved: it can mean the bloody deterioration of entire kingdoms."

 

His words sowed the silence with memories of wars long past: but what germinated instantaneously was the one sparked by his own father, Rhaegar Targaryen, who forsook his marriage for the Rose of Winterfell, plunging all of Westeros into fire and chaos.

 

***

 

Sansa half-hoped, treacherously, that Ilirio would refuse.  That he would pack up his entourage and silks and gifts and go back home.  It would remove the steady pressure of his presence, working on her, making her body hyper aware of him whenever he looked at her.  But the man only smiled that insufferable, smouldering smile, clasped her hand, and bowed low to kiss it.  "For you, my Queen, I would wait until stars burned from out of the sky."

 

"Thank you, my lord," she said.  "Let us hope it does not come to that."

 

He laughed, loud and clear.  "The hart that is hardest to catch provides the sweeter feast."

 

Her face must have shown clear disapproval because he laughed all the more.  It perplexed her that he found her fluster endearing.

 

Later, when she could have a word with Jon, she cornered him: "So this is what you have in mind?  Playing and enticement and subterfuge?  This is not what I expected when you promised me you would share your mind in time."

 

"You want my mind, truly?"  The way he panted at her when they argued reminded her so much of a wolf.  "Then you have to let me find it first."

 

She scoffed.  "Surely, you have an opinion, Jon.  You haven't tasted an ale you haven't liked without your whole face betraying it.  If you have a valid reason for Ilirio's unsuitability, I would hear it."

 

"Fine!  It is this: I am not going to give my blessing to a marriage for you unless I know that you will be loved."

 

"How can anyone  _know_ that?"  Incredulous.  Small.  All of one and ten again.

 

Jon set his expression, like an effigy in stone.  "I'll know."

 

 

***

 

Jon's arrival was precipitated by Ghost's scrabbling at the door.  His knock rung softly.  Sansa almost thought she imagined it.  When she opened it there was but a heartbeat between the moment she recognised him and the moment she was holding him.  He threw himself into her arms, and she knew the flames had returned, threatening to eat him alive.  Her hair fell loose over her shoulders, but he tangled himself in it.  Somehow, she managed to put an arm out and push at the door to swing it closed again.

 

He moved his head back-and-forth, back-and-forth, rubbing her red and raw in the open neck of her shoulder.  They stood like that for many, many minutes, til Sansa's body grew numb with cold -- though only the back of her: there was little to keep her body warmth from escaping through the linen nightdress, save where his hands joined; but Jon's firm heat to her front was tight and seamless.  A voice that reminded of her lady mother niggled perhaps it was unseemly,  _immodest_ , to hold him so; but Jon needed her, and he would have whatever she could give.

 

At last he seemed to gather his restraint and lift his head, but he kept his eyes down.  His face, lined and pale.  His eyes remote.

 

"Better?" she said.

 

He nodded but wouldn't lock eyes.  Not a satisfactory response.  

 

Sansa sighed and dropped her arm, but kept the other around his waist so she could steer him into the room.  When she led him to the side of the bed she let go, and gave him a little push on the back so that he fumbled his boots off and lay down, while she went to the other side and climbed back underneath the furs.  They lay on their sides, facing each other, in the dark and quiet for a long while.  She watched him closely, his dark eyes cast in darker shadow, wondering where he went when he was like this.

 

His breathing came deep and even.  She thought he had fallen asleep.  But then he said, just above a whisper: "You weren't exactly right.  About Dany, I mean."

 

The pet name made her nerves curl, but Sansa waited, giving him space to go on if he needed.

 

"It wasn't that I loved her, exactly.  I mean, I thought I did.  But -- she had this way about her; this purity of intention, a driven single-mindedness of will that swept up anything and everything in her path.  It was intoxicating.  To be a part of something,  _someone_ , so sure and steady.  I let it get the better of me, I know.  You and Arya tried to warn me, and I was stupid."

 

Sansa reached out, without speaking; she hooked her finger around his own, to reassure him she was listening.

 

"Have you ever been so blinded by someone that you couldn't see them for what they really are?"

 

Sansa closed her eyes.  Yes.  Oh, yes.

 

"When she burned down King's Landing, I was ... I was in denial.  I wouldn't fight, I tried to stop them, but I should have seen the signs long before.  She burned Varys alive, for telling a truth she asked me to deny.  There was a woman -- a Northman was at her, he tried to -- he tried to -- I ran my sword through him, all I could see was you shaking at Castle Black ... all I could think of was that you would hate me.  And Arya -- gods, she shouldn't have been there.  She was covered in blood and ash...

 

"Did I do the wrong thing?  Killing her, a woman, putting a knife through her heart when I was the one person with whom she had every reason to assume she could be safe?  Was I a coward?  Sansa?"

 

"Oh, Jon."  She didn't have any easy answers for him.  "You were, by rights, the true heir to the Iron Throne.  She forfeited her claim to the crown when she condemned innocents to dragonfire.  You sentenced her to death.  Father said, the man who passes the sentence swings the sword.  You are no coward.  You've never been that.  It was your first and last and greatest deed as King of the Seven Kingdoms."

 

"I may not be a coward.  But I'm not brave like you."

 

"I didn't know merely doing what one must is brave."

 

"It's the only thing that is."

 

She might have laughed.  He could never hear that what he was and what he wished was one and the same.

 

Again they fell silent, and a long stretch of time passed so that Sansa thought he slept.  Then he spoke.  "I don't know if I loved her.  But -- it wasn't right, I see it now.  The things she asked of me: to deny who I was, to lie to my loved ones.  I had to be smaller than her, Sansa.  Conquering was all she knew how to do.

 

"I don't want that for you.  Please understand.  A man like Ilirio, he is charming and silver-tongued; he may even think he loves you.  But if he tears you down ... if he makes you feel like less, in any way ... I don't care if he's your lawful husband, wedded to you before the old gods and the new -- I will put a knife in him as surely as I put a knife through the heart of Daenerys Targaryen."

 

Sansa watched him.  Emotions wrestled inside her, vying for dominance.  He was mad to put so much by her happiness.  He was dear.  Oh, he was dear.  She wanted to say something, to reassure him, but she didn't know what to make of it herself.  She was spared having to respond.  He drifted to sleep almost immediately.  The slack of his hand hooked to hers and the dip of his breathing.  He didn't respond to his name.  She reached out and brushed a curl back from his brow.  His face, in sleep, looked a different creature.  The permanent furrow of his brow, the tenseness around his mouth dissipated.  He was gone, and she wouldn't wake him in that moment for all the world.

 

***

 

He woke in the gray before dawn.  In the night his sleeping self found his way beneath the covers, angling his body so that his feet were as far away from her as possible -- and his head sat almost on her waist.  Her arm arced out to accommodate him.  Even from his view it looked uncomfortable.  He tried to move so as not to wake her, jumping lightly from off the bed, dodging the sleeping bulk that was Ghost, skidding quickly over the cold stone floor to sit and pull his boots on by the fire.  He threw in a few logs and stoked the flames.  His eyes landed on the little carved wolf on the mantelpiece.  He thumbed it.  Rough grooves meant to be shaggy fur.  He took it, returned to the bed, and placed it on the edge of the pillow, nearest Sansa.  When she woke in the morning, he would be gone, but she would find the little carved wolf in his place.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does not beta. Replies to all comments.
> 
> (Also, I think I set Anonymous Asks up on tumblr, so you can do that if you want, idk.) /is old


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sansa has a revelation.

Sansa dreamt she sat in the godwood and all the flowers were in bloom.  Lady was with her.  Sansa stroked her and brushed her hair and spoke to her in a sing-song voice.  Then Lady was not Lady anymore, but Ghost.  And Jon was standing over them, telling Ghost to get up, but Sansa held him to her lap, saying  _no, no_.  Then Ghost and Jon were gone, and Ilirio stood with her in the sept, and he kissed her.  She heard the voice of her septa, echoing as from a long distance,  _You will bear him sons_.

 

***

The second spring lambing broke upon them, throwing everything out of balance.  The lambs could come at any time, and the shepherds needed to go in shifts to be attendant should birthing go wrong or a lamb be sickly.  The extra pressure on the shepherds fed back into town, which in turn trickled into Winterfell, and there was a rush of activity and shifting of duties for the next few days.  Sansa and Jon rarely met except in passing, and their focus was practical.  But when Jon went in to the armory one day to fetch more arrows for the training yard, as she knew he would, he found the little carved wolf sitting on the anvil, waiting for him.

The following weeks brought little leisure, but the exchange of the wolf became a fascinating game.  They would try to predict where the other would go, what the other would do, and so set up the wolf in anticipation.  It became something they looked out for; their day hinged around it.  It was not something they spoke of out loud.  That would ruin the game.  But each time they met their mutual secret was communicated between them:  _where will you find him today?  How will you next surprise me?_

Then one night Jon came to her room as before.  Ghost scratched at the door so that Sansa was ready to receive him, even as she undid the latch.  He walked into her room trembling with nerves, his hands combing through his hair like he was trying to claw away the nightmares.  He stood there in the empty dark looking so utterly lost that Sansa broached the distance first and gathered him in her arms.  For a moment, he didn't seem to know what to do with his hands.  Then he put them around her and took a greedy breath, like a man nearly drowned.  

He didn't need as long this time.  When he was ready, he pulled back.  She looked at him in a question, _all right?_   And he nodded.  As they let go of each other, Jon slipped into the cloud of sleep gathering around his war-wrung brain, and before they pulled away, he kissed her, soft and fleeting, like the first time.  Before his lips left hers, he regretted it.  Everything in him tensed.  His color paled.  The surface of his face disturbed like water from something deep below.   Sansa looked at him, confused, not for the kiss, but for his recoiling from it.  He untangled his arms from her woodenly, and stalked from the room, as if she had branded him.

***

The wooden wolf did not appear any more.  There had never been overmuch verbal communication between them, but the exchanges dropped almost to none, and Jon kept a wide berth of her in public.  He answered her queries with one or two concise words; but not in the way he did when he was sulking.  It left Sansa stunned, and stung.  She'd no idea what she'd done to make him withdraw from her.  She tried not to show her edge; tried not to look desperately for him every morning at breakfast, only to breath relief that he had not gone.

 

He wouldn't leave without saying goodbye ... he promised...

 

Ilirio stepped into the vacuum created by Jon.  She felt a small gratitude because when the man smiled and lavished her with attention, it distracted her from that lack of the other.  She wondered, was this what it was to be like when she married him?  Jon would go, Ilirio would stay, and slowly he would occupy the spaces Jon once did.  This must have been what Jon meant, so many moons ago, when he said that they would not be able to be in each other's company once she married.  But she was not married yet.

Ilirio had sent away two thirds of his retinue, but he kept his minstrel, with whom he often composed songs.  This was one of their activities of an evening: either in the hall if the household dined together, or in the solar with only Maester Wolkan or one of Sansa's ladies present (Jon made his excuses).  She enjoyed singing with him.  He intuited the turn of her voice so that they could pick up any tune and without practice, and it stoked her vanity when he asked her to sing a note for him so he could consider it.

One night, Maester Wolkan dozed, with his head on the back of the chair.  A sharp snore came from his mouth.  Ilirio and Sansa started and looked up, dropping their song.

"I believe our singing has lulled him to sleep," Ilirio said.

"I suppose it has."

They sat with their chairs turned toward each other.  Ilirio placed his lute down near the feet of his chair and boldly reached for her hand.  She gave it, after a brief hesitation.  "Are you happy?" he asked her.

What a question.  It hit too close to something Littlefinger once said to her.  "I want for nothing."

"That's not what I asked."

"I..." but the answer eluded her, and that frustrated.

"It is a crime that one so beautiful and so sweet as yourself should not have every happiness.  What can I give you?  Tell me."

Sansa looked around the solar.  She could have told him anything: something she especially wished to gain from him, or something frivolous and trivial, to make him her hero, to make him happy.  In the end she could only shrug.

"If I give you something ... perhaps you could tell me whether or not it brings you happiness?"

She watched him from beneath half-closed lids, discerning.  "All right."

When he leaned toward her, she knew what he was about.  When he put his lips to her mouth, she allowed it.  His kiss was skilled, nuanced.  His lips moved against hers deliberately.  She didn't kiss back, but she let him to nudge and knead her, and there was a certain skill to this that she had not before considered.  A heat moved through her body, sinking lower, lower -- she pulled back with a noiseless gasp.  The touch of his lips on hers buzzed on her skin.

Ilirio looked at her straight on.  Oh, his eyes were shameless.  "And what is your verdict, my Queen?"

She swallowed, willing the temperature of her body to cool.  Where did this fever and chill come from?  She hadn't been ill a minute before.  "I--I believe I'm ill, my lord.  Please, excuse me."  Her chair dragged loudly on the floor and the maester jumped awake.  "Maester Wolkan, please escort me, I have need of you."  The old man clamoured from his seat, clearly lost as to the where and when, but he recovered himself soon enough and was bowing his way out of the solar, following on Sansa's heels.

***

Maester Wolkan subjected her to all his tests but could find nothing amiss.  He gave her a tonic to drink and ordered her to bed early.  

But Sansa couldn't sleep.  Everything was all twisted up.  She needed to untangle the various threads running every which way because no matter how unrelated, they all fed into the whole.  And she needed a tapestry she could make sense of.  She had done this some nights, back in King's Landing.  Picked up little threads of ideas and thoughts and instances, tugged them, seen where they led.  Then as now, they tangled in such a gnarled mess, that her very insides twisted in response and the pounding in her head drove her to sleep like a manic lullaby.  

As she lay in her bed, tugging uselessly at knots, there were troubling floods in the marshes of the Neck and the wetness brought rot and fever.  Jon was gone, somewhere, and she didn't know how to find him.  And now the kiss from Ilirio, which was neither painful nor boring ... she racked her brain over the past week, trying to discern what she had said or done that turned Jon away from her.

Leaping from one to the other, holding the two side by side drew attention to their parallels.  That night, Jon kissed her, which was a normal enough departure.  It was only afterward that he cut off his touch and attention.  Could he possibly think the kiss he gave her was like the one she'd just had from Ilirio?  

But it was nothing like Iliro's.  Ilirio's made her feel uneasy and eager all at the same time; Jon's was like slipping into warm bath water after a weary day.  Unless -- could he think she had not received it that way?  She remembered the sick feeling, as of spoilt milk, when Littlefinger made her give him chaste kisses as his false bastard.  How could Jon think it was that?  He'd never  _taken_ anything from her in her life: not a crumb, not a step, not even an ounce of Father's attention.  Yet she pressed herself to try and discern what made Ilirio's kiss different from Jon's.  Jon kissed her the way Father had, even Robb when they were yet little, but that wasn't the whole of it.  She tried switching them.  If Ilirio kissed like Jon, and Jon kissed like Ilirio.  No, it would never feel  _natural_ with Ilirio the way it did with Jon.  And Jon -- 

\-- she stalled her wonderings.  The implications of a kiss like Ilirio's coming from Jon frightened -- not of bodily harm, but of standing from a very tall height when one knows one is safe: breath and heartbeat and intimate, organ-deep knowing that one was only a small part of the sublime world after all.  A kiss like that would warrant a wanting the likes of which she'd never known from him.  And she didn't know whether it was the prospect of that want from him, or the lack of it, that made her insides squirm with vertigo.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter but the next one should be big (plot-wise)!


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sansa kisses him.

When she went to breakfast that morning, she felt light-headed and slightly nauseated.  The phantom sickness had not left her.  Jon was there when she went to sit, Ilrio's empty chair sat conspicuously between them.  They both looked straight ahead, unacknowledging of the other.  Sansa's nails pressed into the flesh of her palms.  She closed her eyes and decided,  _I can abide this no longer..._   She opened her mouth, turned her head--

 

Ilirio stepped inbetween them, lowering himself into his chair.

 

"And how is your health this morning, Your Grace?  Last night you left in quite a hurry.  I thought perhaps I had offended you."  Oh, would he  _not talk_  for once?  She didn't particularly want Jon to hear.

 

"The maester says I am well enough.  Though," she put fingertips to her forehead, "I don't recall ever having fallen into a fever so quickly."

 

Ilirio folded his arms.  He lifted a long finger to his lips, considering.  "I see.  Forgive my insolence, my Queen, but could it be possible that what I gifted you elicited such a reaction?"

 

The fever reared back, high and strong, burning in her face and neck.

 

Ilirio saw; she knew he saw because he liked to cause a reaction in her.  His smile deepened, and he nodded a little.  "Such ....  _gifts_... exchanged between a man and woman have been known to cause similar symptoms."

 

Sansa felt the heat drop and rise again, alternating hot and cold.  She remembered, as a girl, when a handsome lordling kissed her hand ... this was like that, then.  Only now served with the suspicion and distaste of years of hurt at the hands of men.  She closed her eyes slowly.  Oh,  _gods_.  She -- what a stupid, stupid woman she was.  She wanted nothing more than to sink low beneath the table and vanish.  But survival instincts kept her upright; her spine straightened.

 

"I don't know what you mean, my lord, I'm sure--"

 

She stopped because she caught sight of Jon from beyond Ilirio, looking in their direction.  His mask of disinterestedness hardened into something tight and precarious.  An almost tactile crackling came off of him, like friction between flint and timber.  If only Ilrio's lithe, insistent body weren't in the way.  She could appeal to Jon, without words, without touch even, and coax the tension from him; but Jon stood and left abruptly.  Ilirio didn't move, or otherwise react to the sound of Jon's brusque departure, but kept his serene smile and attention focused on her.

 

***

 

She needed to think.  She needed to pray.  She needed to see Father.

 

She paced in front of the large doors leading to the crypts several times before she turned and hauled them open to descend.  The cold, damp air hit her like the surface of water, and with it, a lingering terror, of dead things and crying children.  She would not be detained.  She settled her cloak around her and pushed forward.  In one hand she held two slim, white candles.  In the other, a lit lantern.

 

She descended into the crypts, conscious of the way, even though she'd not been back since the Battle of Winterfell.  She'd seen to it that all the dead were properly re-interred, and the statues mended.  She'd commissioned one for father, though his body was not present ( _don't think on that now_ ), and she looked at it.  Unspent tears tingled in her extremities.  How could it look so like and yet so unlike him at the same time?  The features could not be duplicated, but the mason who carved it knew Lord Eddard Stark.  It was evident in how it evoked his essence: a quality both stern and gentle, a bit withdrawn, just open enough to invite trust and devotion.

 

Sansa placed the lantern down and lit her candles, pressing them into the sand box on the slab before her stone father.  She started to clear away the ashes and burned-up wax and spent wicks.  What would he have done?  He promised her long ago that he would find her a husband: brave, and gentle, and strong.  Oh, how she needed him now!  Needed his reassurance and his guidance and his wisdom.  Could she not conjure the man he had in mind for her?  Someone kind and fierce like Robb, mischievous like Theon, good like Jon.  She didn't want to be lonely.  But she didn't know how not to be.  Too many hurts hardened with scar tissue around her heart.  No man could fight his way through the ugliness.

 

She finished her cleaning and backed up, leaning against the further wall.  As she looked at the carven face, the flash of that bright warm day rushed her -- Father kneeling on the dais, his bowed, noble head, lips moving in prayer -- Sansa's screaming, bubbling up from somewhere feral and frightening she hadn't known existed before.  She slid down against the wall and slumped on the floor of the crypt.  A cloud of must puffed and settled around her.  

 

She'd been clumsy.  The vibrant memory of her father's death shoved open gates carefully and deliberately guarded.  Alone, out of the light, there was nothing to distract or to buffer.  In the dark with the dead, her mind betrayed her.  Image after image assaulted, from all corners and senses: 

 

_Joffrey's sneer -- the throbbing ache of wood hitting the back of her legs -- Cersei's smile that gave and took away (from the child that needed a mother more than anything) -- Petyr Baelish, making her feel too aware of her own body, making it both powerful and disgusting in a way she was too young to understand -- Aunt Lysa's desperate threats, holding Sansa's body, holding her life, over the moon door -- Ramsay's soulless eyes, empty, ravenous, constantly hungry, seeking to devour -- Theon's tenuous strength propelling her forward, forcing her to live, and then bled from him on the funeral pyre --  Snow on her wedding night.  Dragons screeching.  Fire in the dark.  Ice on the river.  Blood in her mouth; in her sheets; between her legs.  A dead face -- Robb, or was it Rickon? -- boring with the icy blue leer of a white walker.  It reached out to her, and--_

 

Something clasped her.  She screamed.  Flailed.  Cast about wild, un-seeing eyes.

 

"Sansa!"

 

Jon.  Jon next to her on the ground.  Pinning down her arms.  Shaking her.  Was he real?

 

Sansa wailed -- a long, broken, primordial sound she hadn't heard from the inside out since the sword took her father away.  Then her breath came fast, sporadic.  She couldn't get enough air in her.  She was buried alive.

 

Jon fought her thrashing until he got enough of a hold to lift her, pinning her to him so she couldn't jerk away.  He cradled her like a vice, and sped with her back through the crypts, up the stairs, and into daylight.  The bang of doors resonated like thunder.  People started.  A maid dropped a pitcher, shattering it onto the floor in jagged, toothy shards.  Jon's voice snarled: "Who let her go down there alone?"

 

Their fear smelt ripe and heavy on them.

 

"Get out!  Everybody  _get_!  _Out_!"

 

Their bodies vacated the room, leaving everything where it stood: bundles of straw heaped on a table, the broken shards dazzling, like sunlight on moving water.

 

He set her on a stool in the corner, so he could close her off, giving her no view but the solid frame of his body.  Her gasping breaths choked and hitched.  Jon took her face in his hands, and the look on him said he would not be disobeyed.  " _Breath_ , Sansa."

 

Her lungs closed shut.

 

"Look at me.  One breath at a time.  Now.   _Now_."

 

She did as she was told.  One breath, then another.  A few relapses into hyperventilation, but Jon disciplined her with a gentle grip on her head.  The breaths came slower, wider.  Steady.  Shaky, but steady, and her lungs caught on and took over.

 

He lowered his hands cautiously, not taking his eyes from her.  His look was imperial, impossible to shake off.  It fixed on her, and it would not release her until he was satisfied.

 

"Just because you're strong doesn't mean you ought to test your resilience to your last drop of sanity," he berated.  Angry Jon was all right, though.  Angry Jon she understood.  "We've been looking for you for hours.  What in seven hells possessed you to go down there today?"

 

She breathed, in and out.  If she kept eating air there'd be no moisture left for tears.  "Y-you've been so cold to me.  What -- did I do?"

 

His anger bled from him.  She could have struck him.  The fall of his face was so devastating, so complete.  "You -- haven't  _done_ anything, Sansa."

 

"Then why--?"  Each tear denied pricked an infinitesimal pain behind her eyes.  "Was it because you kissed me?"

 

Horror unseated the hurt on him.  It was his turn to choke for air.  "It -- I'm so sorry, Sansa.  I didn't mean for it -- no, that's no excuse, but -- I couldn't trust myself not to violate you again."

 

" _Violate_ me?  But you didn't!  You haven't!"

 

"How can you say that?  I'm twice your strength, I had you in my arms, alone in your room, after taking freely from your comfort, and I touched you, even after -- even after I knew what it meant for you to be touched by a man in that way."

 

"In ...  _what_ way?  Do you think that you could ever touch me or make me feel exposed and used up the way Ramsay did?  Or filthy and depraved like Baelish?  Even Ilirio, gods know he means well, could embody the very icon of chivalry and not come away from me with less cause for my recoiling!  No Jon, you've done  _nothing wrong_."

 

She halted.  At the mention of Ilirio Jon's look wavered, and went unreadable.

 

"Don't--"

 

"He kissed you."  It was not a question.

 

A shuddered exhale.  "I let him, Jon.  It was all right, he didn't hurt me."

 

Jon stiffened, the softness drained.  Her assurance slid from off him.  He was no longer open, malleable.  His inner workings shut to her.  She stared straight at him, head throbbing with withheld tears.  What could it mean?  What could it all mean?

 

The decision was full and present before she was even aware of it.  He saw it too, because his hardness let up.  His eyes widened a little.  Pleading.  Shook his head slowly.  " _No_ , Sansa."

 

The power to command slipped away from him and back to her: like the wolf game, passing back and forth constantly between them, never stalling, always in transit, so no one person could tip the balance.

 

She leaned toward him, and her hands came up, hovering over his collarbone.  He didn't move, but watched her approach, with the guarded eyes of a hunted quarry.

 

She kissed him.   With a gentle but insistent pressure,  _she_ kissed  _him_.  And then her palms settled on his shoulders, and she let herself measure the feel and weight of it.  It was  _good_.  Like summer and starlight and singing and bells on a horse's bridle and laughter and ale around a bonfire on a dark night and ribbons in a child's hair.  It was  _good_.  She leaned into him.  Jon's careful control fell -- the dropped pitcher, splintered into infinite shards.  He kissed her back, with unbridled intensity.  She thought,  _he'll devour me whole_.

 

It was  _not_ like Ilirio.  It was wild and raw and clumsy, and so very  _him_.  Rough and unmeasured and -- oh, it was too much.  So full and overwhelming and elemental.  She awakened some single-minded, driven thing: like the ocean tide, pushing and pulling, or the weight of snow on a mountain.  She eased off a little but he was too undone; she had to push off his chest with a gasp; to say, " _Stop_."

 

It was the wrong thing to do.  She hadn't meant it, not like that.  But it was too late.  His palpable and bitter shame hit her, worse than a blow.  And before she could salve this new hurt between them, he fled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Independence/Rebellion Day, depending on your allegiance. 
> 
> Nervous about posting this, hope it's okay! Hit me up, fam.


	12. Chapter 12

 

Jon needed.  Jon needed many things.  He needed a quiet room inside his own self where he could go and shut out everything and everyone.  He needed a trapdoor into that room, for something -- or someone -- to slip in when he forgot it was time to come out and thrive again.  He needed open spaces, and wild living things, and access to trees and hills and towers.  He needed a good sword, a sound bow and a few arrows, a sturdy knife, meat, and drink.  He needed to know he could shut his eyes and open them again and he wouldn't be burning alive or buried in bloodied, rancid bodies.  He needed to put space between himself and Sansa.  He needed to see how much a threat he was to her, to himself.

 

So he did what a dragon would do.  He went up.  He climbed, and before he even knew it he was in the deserted tower.  Breathing hard, he stumbled up to the window ledge, put his hand out to catch his weight, and leaned.  From up high everything was manageable.  He remembered what it was like to ride Rhaegal.  How the landscapes and objects below receded until they became insubstantial.  How it was terrifying and exhilarating and so right, and that was what it was like kissing Sansa.  His heart pitched.  Why couldn't he just  _be_?  Why couldn't he just be happy?

 

He'd been born with a forward motion, and that drive never stopped, his going north, not ever.  Being a bastard means you're never on solid ground.  So he went where the current took him, up to Castle Black, beyond the Wall, and back.  To Winterfell, down to Dragonstone, to Winterfell again, and south to King's Landing.  He could have put his heels in and resisted, but what why would he stay?  He needed to keep moving.  It was the only thing that kept him from sinking.  But as pale orange painted the sky over the horizon, with the sun sat on it like round bird on the branch of the world, he recognised that no matter how far he wandered, how long he strayed, Winterfell was there, here, heartwise, anchoring him with the red string of fate, red as Sansa's hair;  he need only tug it and it would bring him home.  He wanted home.  He wanted Sansa.  And the intensity with which he wanted unnerved him.  Sansa was all he had left.  He wanted her happy and whole and intact.  He wouldn't risk damaging her just to satisfy stupid, selfish wants.  He was such a gaping black hole of need.

 

How did they get to this point?  He wracked his brain trying to fit it together.  He knew the moment they saw each other at Castle Black, in the rush of snow and wind and uncertainty, that they would never go back to the way things were.  He hadn't known the extent of it, but in some ways, Daenerys was right.  Sansa was not the same girl he grew up with.  But not because she'd changed.  She'd become more herself.  She was mineral exposed to stress and pressure; the extent that she transformed was only because of what had always been there.  And what he saw he couldn't unsee.  He'd changed, too.  Together, they were different.  Well, not different, just --  _more_.  How much more became evident when they single-handedly roused the North and took back Winterfell from the Boltons.  Not that they didn't make mistakes.  Jon repeatedly underestimated Sansa.  Sansa kept important information from him.  How effective they would have been if they'd found harmony from the outset!

 

When they had made him King, when Sansa sat next to him with a smile as if she knew all along, even though the shadow of death loomed over them, from every direction, he'd felt an odd sort of fixedness.  If he could have halted the track of the stars across the sky to freeze time, he would have been happy.  To sit and do the thankless work of ruling, but to turn away from it all when the night came, and sit by the fire with a cup of mead and doze to the gentle lull of Sansa's singing.  Hadn't he been happy, even these past moons?  Even the worst of his waking nightmares lost their claws in the rosy haze of belonging.

 

When he went to King's Landing, he hadn't expected to return.  He would die and Daenerys would get her throne, and no one would know of Aegon Targaryen.  But he knew he had to tell Arya and Sansa who he truly was.  He needed them to know.  He needed  _Sansa_ to know.  Why?

 

He stared out the window, the very height Bran from which Bran fell all those years ago.   _It should have been you_.  Catelyn's words.  He could fall.  He could go back to the black and nothing.  He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and pushed away.  He sagged to the floor.  Brought up his knees.  Folded his arms and sunk his face into the cradle of his elbow.

 

***

 

It was dark and still when Jon left the tower.  He moved in the corridors like a nocturnal animal, knowing the way by heart.  When he came to his chamber, he held his breath, to keep the door from wailing on its hinges.  He entered softly, closing it shut again.  The fire was no more than a glow of embers, and as he turned into the room, a shadow extracted himself from the deeper shadows behind.  His grip jumped to Longclaw.  Someone sat on the bed.  Sansa.  He could barley see her, but he knew her shape.  Her hair gleamed copper in the dying light.

 

" _Sansa_."  His gasp ripped, from a place of fear more than anywhere else.

 

She did not answer immediately.  Her words came, slow, as if worked through a fog.  "Where were you?  Where did you go?"  A plaintive, animal sound, like the first time she'd asked him,  _what took you so long?_   "I thought you'd left..."

 

"You shouldn't be here."  He made his voice hard and cold.  "You should leave."

 

She pushed up from the bed, wobbling.  He wondered for a moment if she were drunk or ill.  But there was no potent smell coming off of her, and when she moved, he caught the muted gleam of her eyes, raw with tears.

 

He put his hand up to halt her.  "Sansa, please.  I know you think you can trust me, but you can't.  Not when I can't trust myself to ... to not dishonour you, not dishonour the memory of Father.  I swore to protect you, from anything, even..."  

_Myself_.

 

"I told you, Jon."  She spoke strangely, far away, as one woken from sleep.  "You couldn't hurt me, not even if you tried."

 

He prickled.  Felt his chest rise.  Oh, she was innocent.  "Couldn't I?"

 

She laughed, a short, dismal sound.  "Are you trying to scare me now?  Do you think  _you_ could scare  _me_?  I've known real monsters, Jon.  And I told you, as I've told you before, as I'll tell you again.  Over and over again until you  _hear_ me.  You're as far from them as anyone I've ever met."

 

He stepped toward her, drawing himself up, like an animal under threat.  But she mirrored his stance, with equal height, facing him head on.

 

"Is it because," she moved even closer.  His eyes adjusted to the red glow; he could just make out her features.  "Is it because I'm your sister ...  _was_ your sister?  It's never been that way between us, not really, not for me.  Not like it was with you and Arya.  Perhaps you think Father would be disappointed, but I tell you, if you'd been raised as his sister's son, under his guidance, in another life, I believe he would have betrothed us.  You are everything and more that he ever wanted for me, can't you see?"

 

"It's not that, Sansa.  I mean.  Not entirely."

 

"Then is it," her head ducked, her throat flashed, "am I that repulsive to you?"

 

He stared.  "Gods, Sansa.   _No_."  He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his palm to his forehead.  "You -- you don't know what you're asking, you can't."

 

Anger flared in her now, and with it, a moment of relief for Jon, because angry Sansa was fighting Sansa.  And fighting Sansa could survive.  "I know my own mind, Jon.  I think I can determine for myself that I love you."

 

He heaved an exhale.  "You love me ... because I am the last of your family here, the last of your life before it all fell apart.  I'm all that's left of the pack."

 

"No," she said, voice rising.  "I  _just_ love you.  It's as simple and as hard as that."

 

But Jon kept shaking his head, over and over.  "No.  The women who love me are all dead."

 

"I'm not.  Not me."

 

"You will be."  His voice broke.  "I kill everything that comes too near."

 

"Poor Jon Snow."  But her mockery rang false.  "And who loved me who is now alive and well?  My mother?  Father?  Robb?  You could even say Joffrey did -- or, whatever amounts to love for someone not fully human.  And Ramsay.  He loved me, after a fashion, at least in the way of bodies, with pain and blood, but flesh nonetheless.  Littlefinger so much as  _said_ he loved me.  He said it before I had Arya slit his throat."

 

"Is that what you want?  You want me to be another one of those --  _parasites_ \-- to use you just because I can?  Because you're there for the taking?"

 

"You can't take what's been given to you."

 

"Well then, let me give you back to yourself!"  He shouted.

 

A short, frustrated, formless scream.  "You already have!"

 

"Forgive me for being curt, Your Grace, but how can it be both!"

 

Sansa slumped, all the fight wrung out of her.  "You don't love me the same," she said, "I know, and I don't mind.  I could bear it, to keep you here, to keep the ease of being of these past moons.  If -- if you could put aside your distaste for me and let yourself be a man, want me as a man, I would take you as a man -- as my husband, as the true lord of Winterfell and King in the North, and -- and it would all be solved.  For everyone.  I'm not frightened, Jon, just -- tell me.  Please, I can't bare it.  If you don't want me, just say so.  I can take it.  I'm not as fragile as you think."

 

Hope, tenuous as spring, trembled in her voice, like breath across the surface of water.  Better to hurt her now.  If he must hurt her, let her be hurt and live.  "I ... I don't want you."

 

He couldn't look.  He was afraid if he looked, and saw, he would do anything, say anything she wanted.  But for ages she didn't speak.  The coals sighed their dying breath.  When he finally braved a glance, straining through the dark, she was blank.

 

"All right."  

 

She went without haste.  Straight and smooth and distant.  Remote as land at sea.

 

***

 

Jon prepared for his departure over the next few days.  Most people had the kindness to show disappointment, though it was not falsely done.  Jon served Winterfell tirelessly, and his absence would create a hole of responsibilities that needed to be filled.  Sansa was too polite, too queenly -- all graciousness and cold smiles and formality.  Well, let her be.  It was no more than what he deserved.

 

Ilirio, of all other people, seemed the least affected by the news of Jon's leaving.  His smiles remained bright, his conversation lively.  He put a hand on Jon's shoulder and said that he wished him well wherever he found himself -- and that should he ever be in Dorne, to bring Illirio's name forward in reference.  Jon did not return the friendly sentiment.

 

On the morning of his departure, there was no formal good-bye, no gathered party to send him off.  A few people came and clapped him on the back; sent him with messages to deliver; or exchanged a bawdy joke to warm him for his journey.  He smiled out of obligation.  A shrug of the lips that came nowhere near his eyes.  

 

Before he mounted, he saw her in her Stark grays and furs coming toward him and he waited.  He knew she wouldn't say anything.  She wouldn't beg.  She might touch him, though, and that would be just as bad.  But she merely handed him a wrapped bundle, food and clothes no doubt, saying, "For the journey."  

 

He nodded, unable to speak his thanks.  He reached into a pocket beneath his cloak and took out the wolf.  Held it out to her on his open palm.  Her regal posture weakened, and he saw the bend of her, the tired, gentle woman beneath the yoke of responsibility and sorrow.  She took the wolf and pressed it to her mouth.  Then she placed it back into his palm, closing his fingers over it.  Before he could refuse, she turned and walked brusquely away and out of sight.

 

***

 

The days at Castle Black bled one into one another.  The Night's Watch, or whatever it was now, were glad to have him.  He brought knowledge and skill and good counsel.  The younger men looked up to him, and the older ones considered him beyond his years.  In truth, he had seen more of war than many of them in their lifetimes.  But at least the snow was melted.

 

In fact, the entire world seemed to cast off her furs and put on summer.  The daffodils were followed in rapid succession by bluebells, then buttercups, then hydrangeas.  They flowers came later this far up near the Wall, but come they did.  Yet for all the color, Jon walked in gray.

 

When traders came from Winterfell, Jon expected to hear news, but they didn't seek him out right away.  So he had to conjure tasks that took him near and back again, until someone noticed, and waved him over.  There was a formal exchange of pleasantries, before the sharing of news.  It was, as Jon expected, about Sansa marrying.

 

"That prince from Dorne, is it?" Jon asked, feigning disinterest.

 

"No," came the reply.  "She sent him away moons ago.  No, she's to wed her cousin, Robin Arryn, as soon as he comes of age.  And she sent this up for you, my lord."

 

In the oilcloth, wrapped with care, were several articles of clothing, beautifully and attentively made by Sansa's own hand.  He knew her stitches like he knew her signature: small and orderly, but distinct, flourishing in the confines of convention.  The other men would laugh if they saw him admiring stitches.  But he was gone, farther away from her than he'd ever been, and still, she made clothes for him.  As he fingered the sleeve of a shirt, something crumpled beneath, and he drew out a piece of paper tucked between the fabric.  He broke Sansa's seal and read greedily.

 

>  
> 
>  
> 
> _Jon,_
> 
> _I want you to know that the moment I saw you that day at Castle Black, starving and half dead from cold, was the first real moment of happiness I'd had since I was a child.  And you've not stopped making me happy since.  I wanted to give you something, to repay what little I can.  A small happiness for a happiness, if you will.  I know it's something you've long wanted.  I hope it hasn't come too late.  As sovereign of the North, I grant you the name Stark.  You may take it or leave it as you like.  But it is yours.  And one more thing: you can be sure I have consulted with the maester and made all the necessary arrangements and amendments to my will.  I name you the heir; my heir.  Heir to the North, as Robb would have wanted._
> 
> _It is very likely I will never have children.  I do not know whether or not it would have been so, even before Ramsay.  In a way, I am grateful.  Was grateful.  Perhaps the gods protected me.  Perhaps I may bare children yet.  But I don't hold out hope.  If I do not, if it is not for me to know the joy of a sweet babe, then it falls to you.  I have tried to be a good queen, to be the best they could ask for, because you asked it of me.  If I fail, I pass the burden back to you.  Forgive me._
> 
> _Yours,_
> 
> _Sansa_

 

He crumpled the paper and held it to his forehead, trying to absorb, trying to understand.  How long had she known ?  How long had she kept this sorrow, close to her heart, with no one to ease it, no one to confide to?  

 

That intolerable, prideful, stubborn, wilful, deliberately infuriating woman!  Giving him the name Stark!  Endangering her own claim!  Risking the wrath of her lords and vassals!  And if that were't enough, she'd gone and named him her heir.

 

But that was not what gutted him.  What flayed him -- as prone as the man on a Bolton banner -- was the quiet, secondary news, mentioned in passing.  All this time, the whole debacle of accepting and denying suitors, when she knew, that the very reason for her marriage, tenuous as it was, might've excused her from humble, unhappy submission.  How easily it could have been brought forth.  And with a maester's agreement, it was as good as settled.  She didn't  _need_ to marry anyone!  She could have told them she was incapable of bearing heirs and been spared this, this -- grave and final sacrifice.

 

If she could be so brave ... if she could open herself to all the hurts and loves of living, what couldn't she do?  Most wondrous thing, more miracle than dragons.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did this kill you like it killed me?


	13. Chapter 13

Ilirio had been gracious.  When she told him she couldn't wed him, he'd kissed her hand long and tenderly and returned his eyes to hers.  "If you should ever want for a lover ... only send for me, and I shall sail swifter than a bird on the wind to be at your side.  You need only say the word."

 

Sansa's face came together in what was her first unguarded smile for him.  "Surely Dorne is full of dark-eyed beauties only too ready and eager to ease the sting of your rejection."

 

"They are," he said, smiling to himself.  "Though none to rival the icy blue of yours, my Queen.  Tell me, that kinsman of yours ... that  _Jon Snow_.  Before he left here, did he make an offer for your hand?"

 

She shook her head.  "No.  He did not."

 

"Then he is the worst sort of fool."

 

She couldn't marry him, she knew now.  He was too close to someone she might have been happy with, a long time ago, in another world.  The disjointedness,the almost-but-not-quite, would chafe at her every day, irritating like sand in her shoe.  She could have loved him, in another life.  But the girlhood idealism still held strong in her, and it tugged her toward tragedy even without her meaning it to.  No, Sansa would have only one great love in her life.  Once gone, she would be content to package it up and preserve it, set it on a shelf and revere it, for the rest of her days.  Let no one else try to come near it.

 

Sansa felt the loss of Jon as she might feel the loss of her own limb.  His absence was a solid thing.  A phantom.  She bumped into his memory everywhere.  Sometimes she thought she heard his laugh.  She struggled to break the habit of looking over to where he used to sit at council, to gauge his opinions.   _I wish Jon were here._

 

His rejection wounded her, but she meant what she had said.  She was not as fragile as she looked.  And anyway, she loved him.  She could love him well from a distance, from the other end of the world, and it didn't demand reciprocation.  Her love was not a whore, something to be bought and sold, to be withdrawn or withheld on a whim.  She would work her way slowly and deliberately to a shining moment in the future when it didn't have to hurt her so; when she could set aside the unreliable passions of youth and love him with a steady intellectual choice.  Choice was something they'd never been able to take off of her.  Even in the heat, the suffocating closeness of King's Landing, her consent was her own.  They could peel away the very skin from her but they couldn't make her love them.  

 

She understood that Jon was broken.  She was broken, too.  Maybe that's why she couldn't bring herself to hate him.  Or perhaps all the hate in her was used up, burned out like a lamp.

 

Things went much as they always had.  The cogs of Winterfell never stopped, through births and deaths, and attacks and invasions, and the changing of seasons.  Sometimes all you could do was live.  And besides, it was summer now, and summer was a new world.

 

Sansa was resting one day after a bout of illness.  She sat in her chair by a low fire, in her shift, wrapped in a shawl, for it was warm enough.  A length of linen spread out over her lap, embroidering.  There was a knock on the door, hesitant, and she called  _enter_.

 

A figure stood in her doorway.  Hovered on the threshold, neither in nor out.

 

Jon.

 

Her chest moved rapidly.  She managed to order, "Come in," so he would step inside and shut the door.  

 

He wore no cloak.  His hair was mussed and damp from riding.  As she watched him, he unbuckled his belt and threw Longclaw aside, as though to yield to a battle not yet begun.

 

"What.  Are you  _doing_?" he demanded.

 

She took a moment, to regulate the erratic pounding in her chest.  "I'm sewing."

 

He gave her a look, his eyes coal-dark and smouldering.  "You know what I mean."

 

She set aside the length of linen and curled her hands on the arms of her chair.  "Giving you the name Stark," she said, her voice a snowdrift.  "Making you my heir."

 

"No.   _Marrying_."

 

"You know very well why I'm marrying."

 

"If you can't have  _children_ , Sansa, there's no  _reason_ for you to marry.  The entire point of a union is to conceive  _heirs_.  Without that possibility, there's no reason for you to subject yourself to ...  _that_."

 

"I don't see why it's any of your concern, what I do in that regard."

 

"You are the most -- stubborn --  _haughty_ \--"  The words tripped on his tongue.

 

She stood.  Her temper came off her body like heat.  "I thank you not to come into my bedchamber and insult me.  The people here love you but you push your luck with their queen.  You are far too familiar with me.  Now, if you have no other business here, please go."

 

"And where will I go?"   _Where will_ we  _go?_

 

"I don't know!"  She moved her arms in wider and wider circles.  "Wherever you will.  You've never bothered to heed my counsel in that regard before.  You may stay here, if you wish; it's your home and it always will be.  But I know how distasteful you find that."

 

He took a step forward and stabbed a finger to his chest.  "Aye.  I'm to live here, in  _my_  home -- "

 

"It's  _my_  choice --"

 

"-- while you get a husband you don't love for no reason --"

 

"--  _my_  fate --"

 

"--who can parade you around,  _you_ ,  _my_ wife --"

 

Silence clapped over and swallowed everything.  Something, long held suspended, dropped.  Jon's eyes widened.  He drew a ragged breath.

 

Sansa swayed.  She put out her arms behind her; lowered herself into the chair.  She closed her eyes, to regain her balance, to regulate her breathing.  She put her hands to her face and pressed them against her closed eyelids.

 

She heard him move.  She took her palms away, just as he buried his face in her lap.

 

Sansa leaned, hands hovering over the spill of black curls.

 

"Jon?"  Tinged with worry.  "What is it?"

 

The rough cloth muffled his speech.  "Marry me."

 

"What?"

 

"Marry  _me_ ," he said again, speaking into the tops of her thighs, chest braced on her knees.

 

Silence.  He forced himself to look at her.

 

Her face was soft, questioning.

 

Quietly, like the fall of snow on skin.  "Marry me, Sansa.  If you can risk the hurt again, after everything, then I can, too."

 

"You don't want me."  The dip of her voice made him shudder.

 

"I lied."

 

"You don't love me."

 

"Like fuck I don't love you!"  His quiet intensity sped Sansa's breathing.  These words were weapons, and he could kill with them.  "I don't have -- pretty words, or-or songs, but.  You're all I've ever wanted.  You always have been, before I even knew what want was.  Before I even learned to see you.  You're home.  Where you go, I will go.  Where you lead, I will follow.  I choose you, and I will go on choosing you, every day, every morning, again and again, over and over, even when it hurts.  Let me be brave with you.  From this day until the end of my days."

 

Her mouth hung, parted.  Her brows knotted.

 

"Say something, Sansa.  Anything.  Tell me I'm wretched and presumptive and beyond forgiveness, and send me away like I deserve.  Say I can be your slave and nothing more.  Or, say we can continue living as we have, together, happy, only we'd share a bed, like brother and sister.  I wouldn't ever touch you, not unless you wanted me to..."

 

"A-and?" she stuttered, breathless.  "If I wanted you to?"

 

His brows met, his eyes trembled.  But the only thing that would do now was the truth.  "Then ... I want so very much for you to bear children, Sansa.  And I want to be the one to try to give them to you."

 

 

He watched her eyes drift to the ceiling and sink closed.  Heard her tattered breaths, in and out.  Fear and want swept over her in shadows, like the wings of birds --  or dragons.  He knew what to do now.  No, the time for words had passed.  Promises were empty.  It was time to act.

 

He stood and retrieved Longclaw with a narrowness of purpose that made his movements clipped and dangerous.  His focus swung back to her, and that same steely intent skimmed over her skin, raising goose-flesh.  He approached and grabbed her -- though not to harm, not to hurt.  Arms braced beneath her knees and behind her back, he lifted her in one strong motion, cradling her to his body.

 

"W-what are you doing?"

 

"Stealing you."

 

She didn't fight him.  She kept still in his grasp.

 

In the broad light of day, in nothing but a shift and shawl, with her hair loose and living around her shoulders, Jon carried the Queen in the North through the halls of Winterfell, out into the wide, summer-soft air, shutting down looks or any would-be questions with of a glance that could severe a man's head.  He met no official resistance until he bundled her onto a horse in the stable.  A motley group of guards and castle workmen tripped in, their hands held awkwardly, unsure, around swords and bows.  But the jerk of Sansa's head and the desperate waving of her hands told them to let off.  Jon turned and hissed, "Don't dare follow."  Then he hauled himself into the saddle behind her and set the horse to a gallop.

 

They rode out through the gates of the keep, in the balmy yellow sunshine, into a  world ripe with potential.  They did not ride long.  Presently they came to the cusp of a hill and below it, a wooded carpet spread, but the leaves of the trees shone crimson.  Into the weirwood grove they rode, and as the horse slowed to a trot, Sansa saw the heart tree -- recognised the haunted, introspective face carved into the white bark like flesh -- and a tall, commanding presence lingering near stepped out to meet them.  

 

It was Tormund.

 

Jon halted and alighted from the horse, before grabbing her about the waist and setting her on her feet.  She adjusted the shawl around her body and looked at him, her face an open question.  But Jon just took her arm, sliding down to hold her hand, and walked backward, leading her toward the heart tree.  As he walked, he pivoted, and she saw him nod to Tormund, who spoke.

 

"Who comes before the old gods?"

 

Sansa stared, swinging her head from Tormund to Jon.  Searched for something to make sense of, something to latch on to.  So Jon caught her gaze with his own, and gave a faint nod.

 

And it was like it had been in the pitiless winter woods, when she took Brienne as her sworn sword, with only Theon and Pod to bear witness.  Stripped to essentials, nothing but the bare, blunt truth of it.  Here, in the weirwood, with Tormund as presider and witness, they forwent all titles and positions, allegiance and identities, shunned like garments before a final, refreshing plunge.  Here, in the private room of woods, they were only Jon and Sansa.  

 

She found the words, hearing them, comprehending them, even as she spoke.  "S-Sansa, of House Stark, comes here to be wed.  A woman, trueborn and -- f-flowered.  She comes to beg the blessing of the gods.  Who comes to claim her?"

 

"Jon Snow."  He squeezed her hand in his.  "Who gives her?"

 

Sansa looked up from their joined hands, and her features hardened into resolve.  "I do."

 

Tormund said, "Do you take this man?"

 

"I take this man."  And all of her, everything in her being, leaned into that emphatic  _yes_.

 

Tormund's face was a passive thing, but they neither of them saw it.  They looked at each other, penetrating, and as the big Wildling moved off, meandering beneath the red haze cast by sunlight mingling with leaves, drawing the horse with him, Jon laid Sansa down beneath the heart tree and made her his wife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was hard to write, guys. Thank you to those who encouraged me on tumblr, or here, with comments. I'm sad this is coming to an end. I think I've got one more chapter in me!


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Changed the rating *just in case* for tasteful mention of marital matters.

They lay for a very long time in the warm and dappled red, on top of Sansa's shawl spread over the springy moss; and they talked quietly, of little insignificances, of things lovers do --  _when I was a child, I dreamt I saw a unicorn_  --  _I like the way light pools in the bowl of a spoon_  -- and they played their fingers together and took their time learning each other in a new way.  There was a whole new dimension to explore between them, and it was no easy thing to approach.  Jon laid next to her in the shelter of the wood, facing her, telling her,  _you're in charge_.   _You set the pace_.

 

Her hands shook as she reached for him, and something sweet and feral bloomed in him.  He let her kiss him, and in that kiss she tried to convey a thousand promises and one.  When she pulled back, he looked dazed.  Then a slow, steady hunger crept over his features, and he licked his lips, and his eyes danced over her face.

 

" _Again_ , Sansa."

 

So she kissed him again, and then he kissed her, too.  No need to think after that because to know was to do; and he knew he would be inside her, beneath the gentle yield of fabric, filling her, reaching, pressing, always driven onward.  He couldn't get close enough.  In his moment of vulnerability, she held him as he shuddered violently; whispered encouraging words to him; told him, _You are so, so beautiful._

After, he started to move off, because he wanted to give her back what she had given, but she tightened her arms and legs around his body and kept him inside her.  They fell asleep like that.

 

Now, in the increasing chill, they began to stir, knowing they must return.  Tormund would be waiting for them with a horse outside the wood.  He would ride back with them to Winterfell and bear testimony of their valid and licit marriage before the old gods and the heart tree.  The lords and council would range from irked to outright livid; they were leaning heavily toward a marriage with Robin Arryn, though they'd run into practical trouble, and nothing as yet was official.  No betrothal had been broken, which was no small mercy.  But as it stood, Sansa steeled herself for the inevitable smoothing-over she would have to do -- as long as she needed until the surprise settled, their love of Jon remained, and everyone saw, as she did, how he was the perfect counterpart for queen and kingdom.  And Jon would be by her side, a silent, steady strength, supporting her through all of it.

 

"Why did you bring me here?" she asked him.  "You could have taken me to the godswood in Winterfell, to the rock and pool where Father liked to clean his sword."  She'd spent many a sweet summer day in childhood playing there, before things turned sour, before the shadow of Ramsay fell on her home like dark cloud.

 

Jon wound a long strand of red hair between his fingers.  "I wanted to marry you where we were both free."  He needn't say any more.  She understood.

 

"Will you take my gift?  The name Stark, I mean?"

 

He considered.  "It was the one thing I wanted more than anything, in days gone by.  That, and a lady wife."  He caught and kissed the back of her hand emphatically, causing her to blush like a maid.  "One heart's desire is enough for this black bastard.  Two would kill me.  And anyway, I'm Jon Snow.  You've always known me as Jon Snow.  You love me as Jon Snow.  I think he is not a sorry man."

 

***

 

They rode back through the gates with the dying dusk, and the fires on the castle walls burned and danced.  Tormund, his jovial, irreverent self once more, sang loudly in ancient tongues, so that even if all of the castle had not been on alert for Sansa, they could not have entered unnoticed.  The crowd increased as people came to look over the queen, having heard she'd been returned unhurt, with a disgraced former king and a Wildling, as if she'd dipped into and out of a song.  Sansa waylaid a chambermaid and was able to send her ahead to build up the fire, bring hot water for washing, and turn down the bed.  Tormund said he would avail himself of their famous southern hospitality and made straight for the wine cellars.  No doubt he would have his fill of drink and song and the listening ears of admiring women tonight.  Then Jon Snow led Sansa Stark through the halls, up the winding stairs.  The chamberlain, the steward, and a handful of other people hung about, wishing to speak.  But Jon dismissed them with a simple, "The Queen will sleep now."  And he stepped into the room behind her and shut the door.

 

He kept her in bed for two days.  On the third day, they rose, and presented themselves to the Hall of Lords for the first time as man and wife.

 

***

 

Her lords insisted on a second, sept wedding; they had no great love for the faith of the Seven, but her role as queen warranted some kind of show of ceremony and public spectacle; and in truth Sansa didn't mind.  Jon, for his part, said he would marry her as many times as he had to, though he despised being the center of attention.  The soft Jon who longed for primacy of place in Winterfell was all angles now.  Death had turned him into a misanthrope.

 

Sansa wrote immediately to Brienne and Bran.  Bran's response was terse but to the point.

 

_This took a great deal longer than I expected.  Some things shall have to be rearranged, but of course I'll come._

 

***

 

Things remained much the same between them.  In the days they worked with each other, and in each other's company; took meals together; rode out together; and separated readily enough to attend to their own duties and whims as well.  But in the nights, they learned a different language: lessons that went slow and sometimes painfully.  Sometimes Sansa couldn't be touched.  And that was hard on Jon.  He found it difficult not to take it as rejection, especially when she flinched away from him.  When his face went hollow with insecurity, it was all Sansa could do but to hold his eyes steady and say, "It's not you.  It's not your fault."

 

Some nights they only talked.  Curled toward each other like double moons beneath the furs in the chill summer nights, their voices undulated, fading away, and picking up again.  They spoke of their shared childhood and about their hopes for the future; about people who were gone and people they missed.  Sometimes, when they were restless, they stole out of the castle, to raid the apple stash in the kitchens, to run with Ghost in the godswood, or to soak in the hot springs.  They knew the place well enough to get around without being seen.  Even if they had been sighted, they felt no shame in their capricious night retreats.

 

Some nights, Sansa huddled over, hugging herself, and cried, because what was the point?  What was the point if he couldn't get a babe on her?  And she was so, so damaged.  But he wouldn't let her weep for a brokenness that made her more than whole.  He held her firm; told her, "The _point_ is to be close to you."  

 

And Sansa believed him.  Because, even though she tasted the telltale notes of carnal desire in him, as she had in other men, they were mated so thoroughly to reverence and self-denial that they became something else entirely.  She didn't know a man could love like this.  Her girlish songs gave her hopes for stolen kisses and soft caresses, but had left her dark with the nature of conjugal love.  When she learned it at the hands and mouths of predators, she thought, no wonder the songs didn't speak of it.  The hero stole the princess and that was the end of it.  The rest was monstrous.  But the way Jon wanted her was different.  The want existed for its own sake, as a third external thing, not merely for him.  And oh, how she dreamed of that want, of that love getting strong, detaching -- becoming so wholly apart, so entirely itself, that it grew arms and legs and tiny toes, nestled beneath her heart.

 

***

 

A cart of lemons arrived from Dorne a week before the wedding, a bridal gift from Prince Ilirio.  Sansa wanted to store them and have them served in various delicacies for the wedding.  But Jon took a sudden, irrational dislike to citrus fruit.  Sansa asked him, after the council filed out one day, if he were jealous.  He huffed and said, "I'm not jealous," and stalked out of the room.  

 

"He's jealous," Sansa said to Ghost, who tilted his head and lifted his solitary ear at her.  

 

A minute later, Jon came back in with his face glowing red and said, sulkily, "All right.  I might be a little jealous."  

 

He decided it was worth it to hear the sound of her laughter.

 

***

 

The morning of the ceremony, Jon and Sansa went into the crypt, arm and arm, to beg the blessings of the gods and the witness of their ancestors.  Jon was loath to let her go, but in the end, it was he who struggled.  He knelt before the stone statue of their father, with his hands clasped and head lowered, and she saw the moment his doubt started to drag him down.  So she took his chin in her hand and angled his face toward her, and told him of the day in King's Landing when Father had promised to make her a match, with someone strong, and gentle, and brave.

 

"Eyes on me," she said, and she led him out of the crypt, as a star leads a ship in the night.  And he kept his eyes on her in the sept before all the people, when the septon bound their hands and bid them swear.

 

It was sweetly powerful, like drinking too much mead, having everyone there with them.  Brienne and Pod rode up with Bran from the south, as did Sam and his family.  There was a ruddy little boy named Jon to play with Little Sam now.  But Arya had not been heard from since the first waves of spring broke on Westeros.  Ravens were sent, but they knew, if she had achieved what she set out to, that she was far beyond the reaches of the world, in lands or seas no raven could reach.  Perhaps it was for the best.  Arya was sister to them both, and it would have been hardest on her to reconcile their union.  Jon gave Sansa a plain sewing needle that morning, before she dressed.  He pressed it into her palm and asked to wear it, and she knew it was meant for Arya.

 

Sansa of course made her own dress.  She forwent virgin white and Stark gray for a deep green, embroidered with white flowers and the wings of dragonflies.  She wore her hair undone, and in lieu of iron or silver, a crown of greenery and roses.  Her maiden cloak was the finest work she had ever done.  But when it came time for the customary cloaking, it was Sansa who cloaked Jon.  He wore no house colors: neither Stark, nor Targaryen.  True to his wishes, he presented himself before the gods, and the cloud of witnesses, as Jon Snow.

 

Tyrion was a little wistful at the feast afterward, lamenting the loss of a good wife now, along with his freedom.  "And look at them," he said to Ser Davos.  "They look no different ... they are exactly the same."  Even their posture and positions had not changed since the feast after the Long Night: Jon sitting on the arm of his chair, hugging a cup to him; with Tormund jeering and overflowing in both joy and drink; and Sansa looking on, her smile tying it all together.  Tyrion shook his head.  "And I'd like to think I'm a good reader of people."

 

Davos scratched his beard in thought.  "Perhaps that is the lesson we're meant to take away from here.  The best place to hide a truth is in plain sight for all to see."  He thought back to the early days in Castle Black; the way Sansa's sudden appearance stuttered all their plans; the way a touch from her swung Jon's grounded center off its axis.  And where had he gotten an idea like the one he'd had?  An honourable man and a noble woman indeed.  

 

"The Targaryens are gone.  The Baratheons and Lannisters are all but extinct.  And look how the Starks thrive," he said.

 

Tyrian grumbled.  "Don't put so much by the Lannisters' extinction just yet.  I intend to serve out my sentence as Hand as fast as possible, get a wife, settle down, and drink and breed myself into a stupor until the end of my days."

 

He cheered up a bit when Sansa gave him a kiss on his scruffy cheek -- after a fierce warning to stay away from Jon with any more of his solutions -- and found a great deal of comfort in the free-flowing wine.  "I hear there is to be no bedding ceremony," he said loudly, over his cup, "as the queen and her husband consummated their union quite some time ago."  He hiccoughed and leaned to the nearest person who would listen, proclaiming, in a mock-whisper, "I didn't ask!"

 

***

 

Jon looked out the window.  Lights scattered like myriad candles in a crypt, in and out and around Wintefell.  Bonfires burned in the countryside.  Tonight people would drink and sing until dawn.  The raucous noise of celebration drifted from the hall and courtyard below.  "I'm glad we gave them this," he said.  "They deserve it."

 

"Not just them, surely."  He turned around to see her carefully lift the flower crown from her russet head and place it down before her mirror.  The heavy, embroidered dress shed and draped in a corner.  Her bare arms reflected the glow of flames from in and out of the room, but the scars shone a sickly white.  She moved heavily these days; and he thought it would come as a bittersweet relief when they all went, and things returned to a normal rhythm.  She lowered herself to sit on the edge of the bed, still tall and queenly but clearly tired.

 

He came over and sunk his knees onto the bed, facing her.  Took her hand in his.  "Not just them."  She smiled prettily, and it made him dip his head before glancing up again.  "Let's get married again tomorrow," he said, and her smile cracked open wide, but he leaned in closer.  Did he mean to be a relentless tease?  "And the day after that.  And the day after that.  And the day after--"

 

She laughed, but placed a hand over his mouth, and he left off speaking.  "I don't think I have the stamina to survive that many wedding nights."  She pressed her, lips together, ducked her head, and looked up at him from beneath a fringe of lashes.

 

A comfortable heat responded in him.  He dropped his gaze again, down to their grasped hands.  Shyly, "Are you tired?"  His eyes layered meaning over the question.

 

She shifted, knowing this was his way of asking permission.  She looked paler than usual.  Blue touched the hollows around her eyes.  She sighed deeply.  "A bit -- yes.  Well, more overtaxed than anything."  He nodded.  Moved around her to the center of the bed and leaned against the headboard, his legs spread straight and crossed before him.  He gathered her toward him, the gentle pressure of his arm around her, and she let him guide her, sinking her head onto his stomach with an audible exhale.  His hand came to rest in her hair.  She moved up and down with his breathing -- a sensation like floating in ocean beneath a blue sky.  Sansa felt herself sinking into sleep when Jon spoke again.

 

"You spoke to Sam a couple of days ago.  Did he say ... did he have any advice?"

 

Her eyes closed, she murmured.  "Mmhmm.  Plenty.  Although after a prying interview and a thorough examination, I daresay it isn't needed."

 

Jon shot up, his body curling over her, causing her head to slide from off of him.  "What?"

 

Sansa lifted herself into a sitting position.

 

"I ... was waiting to tell you because it- it's early yet, and I'm frightened, I -- I don't want to hope."

 

He stared at her and carefully placed a hand to her middle.  It was flat yet but she could feel the ripening in her, pressing and expanding.

 

Jon dipped his head, trying to place himself in the line of her tracking eyes.  Finally, he caught her gaze, and drew it up with him.  "Sansa.  This is already more than I could have hoped."  His eyes crinkled in a smile.  He touched her, deliberately, stroking her back, tracing his thumb along the line of her jaw, placing faint kisses to the corner of her mouth -- he didn't overwhelm her with these types of touches, so that when he did give them, they felt shy and new -- preening over her as if she were the first woman in Westeros to get with child.  His pride in her touched a nerve, and she held back a tremor of tears.  

 

His dark eyes glittered.  "Only -- who's the father, do you think?"

 

She shoved him, hard, and he toppled backward into the pillows in a rumble of laughter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually have an epilogue cooking! You thought you could get away that easily?
> 
> Please, DO keep in touch! Check out my short stories "Seasons" and "The Thaw" for my absolute doctrine about how these two end in canon. Follow me on tumblr, theOriginalSuki, and throw some prompts at me, or ask me crazy questions about this story, such as, what reason did I have to spell Ilirio without a "y" when GRR Martin is so very fond of Ye Olde Englyshe spelling? (The answer is: none. None whatsoever.) Come send me an anonymous ask if you're the kind of person too shy to leave a comment. And please share this story if you enjoyed it.
> 
> Thank you, thank you, for reading, and bringing this story to life with me.


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